You need to be growing and getting better, and in L.A., it's so hard to get bookings. You literally have to pay clubs to book you. It's pay to play, and then you only get 30 minutes. That's no way to get good.

I grew up a huge jock, a lot of basketball and football. We had a pond in my back yard growing up, and we played a lot of hockey, too. I loved to score goals.

I know that sounds almost horribly cheesy, but that is what has to happen if you're gonna make a relationship work for a long time: You have to keep learning new things that are interesting about this person or having them catch you off guard and have these little moments of intense appreciation.

Once you see the impact that you have on people, either at a meet and greet or after a show, you think, 'Oh man, they need to feel better today.'

My family realized I was going to do birth work and then music; they were like, 'What's a doula? This is not what you were meant to do!' And I was like, 'Everyone thinks they can only do one thing.'

My parents, Mary Agnes Smith and Rowland Smith, both had to work since their early teens, she in the holiday boarding house of her mother and he in his father's market garden in Marton Moss, a village on the south side of Blackpool, just north of Saint Anne's-on-Sea.

As a child marooned in a post-war South London backwater with no ready cash and a bafflingly dysfunctional family, I had to glean my amusement wherever I could.

I don't really remember the day we lost our home in the floods, but looking back I can understand how devastating it was for my parents. I was only six, so I remember us having to move to Adelaide - but not much of the actual day and night of the flood. We had to start all over again and my parents opened a cafe.