I am so not a proper, good female. I can't dance in high heels and I'm just so not girly, but then I see these men with these banging bodies, dancing in heels, singing, and having so much fun with so much make-up on. That makes me honestly want to be a better woman.

Eventually, I would love to be on my deathbed and looked at as an icon. Right now I'm still at the baby stages of my career. But that is the goal.

Just because I'm sassy and have a mouth on me doesn't mean I'm coming from a negative place.

I wanted to make youthful, irreverent anthems. Parents might not get it, but kids would.

When I started off in music, I started with a real innocence, a real love for the instrument, the writing the songs, the playing the songs and the sharing and the recording and experimenting. It was exciting. Then, this thing called success came, and something happened at some point where I became disenchanted, and I lost the innocence.

I don't look at our society today too much. My focus is still in the past, and part of the reason is because what I do - the wellspring of art, or what I do - l get from the blues. So I listen to the music of a particular period that I'm working on, and I think inside the music is clues to what is happening with the people.

I would do a sort of violence to myself if I didn't express myself in the directly creative ways of writing, both words and music.

I started out as a writer of fiction, but nobody wanted to publish my work as a young man. So I decided to put my interest in the narrative writing of biographies.