I've never written for anybody else. For me, it was a challenge. I write for me. I don't write for anybody else. And what was good about it was that I was writing for somebody I knew. I knew what my mother thinks and how she feels. So it was finding that creative spirit to write about my mother.

Life didn't promise to be wonderful.

I love to be in control of everything I do and everything around me. So that means, you give me a romantic lyric and I'll make the atmosphere, I will build on that. And then the song then becomes, it takes me to do the song, it's just a belief, it's just who I am.

I don't ever feel that it's necessary to say certain things. I think we can be very suggestive. I think we can allude to certain things.

When you talk about bad luck and you talk about the things that create those circumstances and you talk about what it takes to overcome those circumstances and naturally to me includes, you know, a faith, a very strong faith. It should because through good times and through bad times there is one thing that relieves.

When I go on stage I am just, I don't make any attempts to do anything more than just what makes me comfortable.

From the time I can remember my mother kept me in church. I think my first recollection of any place, being anywhere was in a church.