As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.

"Country" has become a marketing term. I see myself as a songwriter.

I couldn't listen to music with lyrics for the first few months after the brain surgery, because they were too complex and disturbing. So I listened to a lot of classical music. I didn't really want to read, either, so I listened to books on tape or watched movies. I also re-taught myself all of my childhood piano pieces. It helped me repair my brain.

War is idiocy. We live on a small, small planet, and what we do to others is what we do to ourselves

I think that my sensitivity to music has actually deepened and expanded as I've gotten older. You add more life experience.

Southern gentility is evocative to me.

I was down with Lucinda Williams and Mary Chapin-Carpenter. We did an acoustic tour, just the three of us, three chicks and three guitars