I've never thought about any kind of prejudice about women in country music because I never felt like it affected me. I was fortunate enough to come about in a time when I didn't feel that kind of energy at all, and it was always my theory that if you want to play in the same ballgame as the boys, you've got to work as hard as them.

I've found that men I've dated who are in the same business can be really competitive. I've found a great group of girlfriends in the same business who aren't competitive, but a few times guys have started comparing careers and it has been... challenging.

When you walk out onstage in front of 65,000 people, it can bring you to tears.

Walking through a crowd, the village is aglow. Kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats, under coats. Everybody here wanted something more. Searching for a sound we hadn't heard before. And it said, 'Welcome to New York,' It's been waiting for you. It's a new soundtrack, I could dance to this beat forevermore. The lights are so bright, but they never blind me.

I've always strived to be successful, not famous.

Hendersonville is home because I live there and I work there. But when I come back to Pennsylvania and see the crowds and the landscape, it's such a rush. It just feels like home.

There's an old poem by Neruda that I've always been captivated by, and one of the lines in it has stuck with me ever since the first time I read it. It says "love is so short, forgetting is so long." It's a line I've related to in my saddest moments, when I needed to know someone else had felt that exact same way. And when we're trying to move on, the moments we always go back to aren't the mundane ones. They are the moments you saw sparks that weren't really there, felt stars aligning without having any proof, saw your future before it happened, and then saw it slip away without any warning.