Love is like a promise. Once you break it.. it doesn't come back unless you really fight for it.
Growing up in Nashville, especially in a music business family, means growing up with knowledge that seems like common sense until later in life when you realize people spend thousands of dollars a semester trying to learn or pretending to learn while looking for some intern job on music row.
I like buying iTunes. It's instant.
It was so strange, coming from Nashville, Tennessee, where I was playing to 15 people, to going to London and playing in this crowded little dive pub. I know Tom Petty had a similar thing - I realize, on a lot larger scale.
I had an indie pop phase, I had just about every phase you could think of.
I have this friend who has a theory that lots of towns have energies. And, for instance, certain places in Alabama have bad ones because they were built on reservations or built on cemeteries or something. But Nashville has a really gravitational, magnetic pull.
I had a really bad blushing problem when I was younger. The first time I ever performed was in an English class. I had an essay that I was supposed to write, and, instead of writing an essay, I wrote a song. So, I was playing this song in class, and I literally turned the color of this sweater that I was wearing, completely red. I think it was that feeling of challenging everything in me, my introverted personality. Like, "This is what you have to do. It doesn't matter if you do it wrong, you just have to do it."
As a clown, you're letting go of all of your bullshit.
I think when people watch a lot of artists, they're expecting this showiness, and I'm cracking jokes with people. I'm heckling back. I'm interacting.
I was probably 16.I played - I tried to play these songs that I had written. And, this was a common theme when I was younger: I would write a song about somebody, and they would come to my show. I wouldn't be able to play the whole thing, because, there would be some giant, loaded secret coming up in like, the third verse, or something.
My new favorite thing is to wake up in hotel rooms, and write on the hotel pads. Usually, it's nothing. I leave it in a hotel and get really embarrassed about the maid picking it up, wondering what in the hell I'm talking about.
Words are very much my thing. I'm very picky and choosy with them. So, I kind of edit myself to the point of, almost stumping myself, sometimes.
Anyway, this huge Lena Dunham interview in Playboy. It felt like a shifting, of some kind. This new female archetype - this new, powerful, honest, non-pandering kind of female is becoming more powerful than whatever else has been rocking it for the past 10 years. I heard that Hugh Hefner's daughter is taking over. Which, if a woman is running Playboy, something is right.
I'm not a queen of anything, you know.
I got an email from my dad after the Super Bowl, and he was like, "Will you send me all of the Beyoncé Knowles songs that you have on your computer?" I'm like, "You never listen to Beyoncé. I'm so excited right now." It's good to embrace new things. I like when I can show people that it's not all one genre, and everything is very much inspired by everything else.
My Facebook page confuses a lot of people. I'll post a Beyoncé Knowles song, and, people are like, "What are you doing?! This is bullshit," and I'm like, "No! Beyoncé is the Linda Ronstadt of our day, you don't understand!"
I went to England because somebody told me to, and I loved it. And, "blessed" is a silly word to use for some people, but that's how I feel. I feel blessed.
I used to say that I was making "country music," because it was the quickest, easiest answer. I'm obviously heavily influenced by country music. There was a three-year stint in my life where I listened to nothing else, so, I learned it very well.
When I did the video for "Piledriver Waltz," I was thinking about rodeo clowns, and how they're risking their lives just to keep an entire arena laughing. They're in danger!
I only performed a song so I could not write an essay. I just enjoyed being around bands, and around musicians, and, I didn't want to be the girl who followed the band around. I love singing, I love performing, but it's never been this goal.
