Sometimes listening to music can motivate you. It can. But if you're a musician, that isn't always the way to get new ideas because you don't want to take somebody else's ideas. You need to find your own. So if you go to different artistic mediums, whether it's dance or it's visual arts or films or books, stories, sometimes it gets you hearing things, hearing progressions that you wouldn't come up with if you were just listening to other music because you don't want to copy progressions you've just heard.

Where we focus our energy is where we will get the results.

My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning, she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I'd crawl up on the piano stool, sit on a phone book and play.

It's not as if the stories merge to a point where you think they are your life, but you do let them in the front door and the back door, and it's okay that sometimes certain characters stay for dinner.

The music is the magic carpet that other things take naps on.

Romance is important to me, and to have a romance with your husband takes a bit of doing. The key is to make sure your partner misses you. That means you have to take yourself away.

If I was writing songs just for me I'd only play them in my living room, alone.