Sometimes you see these people who are just so—God—so affected by all of it, where ambition has taken precedence over happiness. But when I meet people who really embody this serenity of knowing that they have had an amazing life—James Taylor, Kris Kristofferson, and Ethel Kennedy... They just seem to be effervescent.

For me, writing a song, I sit down and the process doesn't really involve me thinking about the demo-graphic of people I'm trying to hit or who I want to be able to relate to the song or what genre of music it falls under.

I try to read as much as I can. I try to read an informative article every day. I try to stay read up on our world issues.

My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it's so drawn from my own life and my own stories.

My audience has really become a very diverse group of people. It's not just 15-year-old girls. That's kind of what allows me to write from all the different places I want to write from.

Everybody has that point in their life where you hit a crossroads and you've had a bunch of bad days and there's different ways you can deal with it and the way I dealt with it was I just turned completely to music.

Fearless is not the absence of fear. Fearless is living in spite of those things that scare you.