when you're fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you're gonna believe them. And when you're fifteen don't forget to look before you fall. In your life you'll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team. I didn't know it at fifteen.

I'm so lucky that I get to write my own music and write my own stories, so every single time I look down in the audience and I see somebody singing the words back to me, it makes it all worth it.

I got to play Kim in Bye Bye Birdie, Sandy in Grease, and Maria in The Sound of Music. And it was so much fun for me, but the thing that I looked forward to the most was at the cast parties. After the shows they had karaoke machines set up and that's when I could sing country music.

When I was a teenager, my biggest lessons came from Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, George Strait, Rascal Flatts and Brad Paisley. I learned so much from opening up for those artists, and it also taught me how to treat your opening acts and make them feel like they're part of a family, not just a tour.

I still love writing in my journal and wearing sparkly dresses and looking at old chandeliers.

Your feelings so are important to write down, to capture, and to remember because today you're heartbroken, but tomorrow you'll be in love again.

I would read the Shel Silverstein poems, Dr. Seuss, and I noticed early on that poetry was something that just stuck in my head and I was replaying those rhymes and try to think of my own. In English, the only thing I wanted to do was poetry and all the other kids were like, "Oh, man. We have to write poems again?" and I would have a three-page long poem. I won a national poetry contest when I was in fourth grade for a poem called "Monster In My Closet.