One day, when we were coming back from school, we saw this big cloud of smoke coming up, and all these fire-trucks in the yard. The garage was burning down. I was 14, and we'd lost everything.

I've been busy and need to slow my little tail down and sit and meditate somewhere. I do my walking meditations every day, but just to sit still. Just to be in one place and just to be quiet.

I paid my dues. I have crawled to gigs. I have served people coffee. I worked hard selling all these records out the back of my car. Girl, I'm ready to sell one the real way now.

When I was 15, I begged my grandfather to give me this guitar he'd always had in the back of his closet. I promised him I'd learn to play it, but I never did. Then my grandfather died, and I felt so guilty. So I started playing.

I started doing documentaries in the first place because of the war. I always wanted to do feature films, and I studied directing when the war started, so I was working with actors before, in film and in theater. So I think it's easy to work with actors when you have a script that is clear, when they know what and why they are doing it.

I love playing music with people, but I also just love the art and meditation of being alone and working on stuff.

My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.

When we had to do book reports, I would pick a book that no one read and just make it up and turn that in. I got praised for my imagination.