I love telling stories. I think of myself as a storyteller, and I don't feel bound by being just a singer or an actress. First, I'm a storyteller, and history is stories - the most compelling stories. There is a lot you can find out about yourself through knowing about history. I have always been attracted to things that are old. I have just always found such things interesting and compelling.

I work almost completely year-round, since I was 18 or 19. It's nine months a year, and then you're out of town, (there are) crazy hours and all of the things that go with filmmaking, which is a pretty all-consuming business, although I'm very blessed to be a part of it.

I've been writing music since I was about eight. I would write sporadically. I wrote a lot of music in high school. I guess the oldest song on the record ("I Thought I Saw Your Face") is about eight years old. It's the old "I had my whole life to write my first album and six months to write the second one." I did, to some degree, but actually, a lot of the songs that ended up on the record, I wrote really recently. So it varies.

I was writing tons of music in my spare time. I might be on location somewhere, and I'd go home and I'd have my guitar and my little keyboard or something and write music. Or if I was at home, on my piano. I've always been a late bloomer with a lot of things, just in general, so I think this was something that needed to come to fruition in this particular way.

I think every year I become happier because I become more comfident and more comfortable in my own skin.

I think that if you're serving yourself before you're serving a story then that's where you end up being not funny. It's not about being funny, it's about telling a story and then the comedy comes out of the situation, I think.

I'm not playing a comedy. I want to be playing the truth of the moment, and then have the comedy come out.