Growing up, I remember thinking country music was all honky-tonks and beer and trucks - Britney Spears was my first concert.

Growing up in east Tennessee gave me my country roots, my twang, and a lot of my stories.

When I was 13, I started writing songs, and it fell into my lap all of a sudden. I wrote poems and journals, but that's when it switched for me to songwriting. That's when I wanted to do everything. It was like a fire all of a sudden. I started coming to Nashville and moved here when I was 15.

In my opinion, it's all about the song and the performance, not the gender.

I got my own sound in Atlanta because I don't listen to anybody's music. When you listen to people's music, you start to say stuff they say as an artist because that's what you've been listening to. Me, I don't listen to anybody. I support, but I don't listen, because I don't want to run with someone style. I do my own thing.

I used to feel that I spent too much of my time in my pajamas doing nothing, and I'd think 'in the time that I don't spend writing, I could raise a family of five.' In a lot of ways, being a writer is lonely and alienating.

I will never be one of the happy stupid that were born somewhere. This way of life is excellent for the imagination. It develops your paranoia. You feel paranoid when you don't understand a country, and being paranoiac is excellent for fiction.

My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books. I've learned that the more I collaborate, like by having someone do a soundtrack to one of my books, the more I see my own work differently.