I kicked the door open, and I'm gonna hold my leg in there. I'm keeping the door open for all these amazing female singer-songwriters that are coming out.

Instead of going to college, I spent my time out on the road learning how to be a better musician.

I really feel every word to every song a lot more than I have in the past.

At the very beginning of my career I felt very strongly about what type of artist I wanted to be.

Music, for me, has always been a community thing. It's always how I make friends and hang out with people, because I didn't know how to do that. This is what makes me special.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

If anything, we older people yearn for a peaceful world even more than young people do. We are the ones who lost friends or relatives in some war. We are the ones who have lived a lifetime of seeing and reading about human suffering.

I've never had friends, and I don't like to be around big groups of people.