I want to push myself to be brave and out of my comfort zone, but I guess I stay in my comfort zone knowing I have my family close by.
I'm strong and I can do things that scare me. I can drive in the snow even though it terrifies me. I'm doing it all alone, I don't have a boyfriend, it was like, "I can do this."
In my 20s, my mom and I went and saw the bridges of Madison County, which are in Iowa, and I had seen that movie with Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep. I've always done these Iowa road trips. I did this transcendental meditation course in Fairfield, Iowa. So I've known since my early 20s that someday I would buy a farm in Iowa.
For a long time I wanted to be special and to stick out amongst the crowd. Something I yearn for now is to be one of many.
[My ideal] is being able to be outdoors, have a labor intensive life, and then have this other life, where I hop on a plane and go sing to people in Norway.
The more you get into conversations with people, you find out they've been brainwashed by the news and they don't actually know any better.
Whether I'm a hero or a zero doesn't really matter. It's all perception.
I'm very much a homebody so once I have my home set up how I want it, that's my zen, my comfy little nest where I drink my wine and watch my Netflix.
I keep re-watching Friends. It's so dumb. There's so much good TV and I'm really into all of it.
I'm really close to my family. As I get older, it's like they're the only people I really talk to.
Because I can isolate and be a bit of a loner, [my ideal] is finding some sense of community where I'm one of many and where my skills are equally as important and valuable.
I'm 33, my generation, when I was young, we'd go out into the woods for the entire day and come back for dinner. I was definitely a kid of the '80s, who was out and about.
I was toying with the idea of ambivalence a lot. It's something I work on, not being so invested in outcomes and being more engaged in the process of my life.
Sometimes people think, "You don't get to have it all, you don't get to be happy, life's a struggle," but what if it's not?
I'll always want to play and share my music with as many people as I can, but the emphasis is more on how do I find a happy place, what's my balance, what's my ideal.
There was a time in my late teens and early 20s where I was motivated by this wanting to get out, to prove to the world that I had something to offer - that kind of youthful spirit, where maybe I had my eye on fame and fortune. I mellowed out in my late 20s and now that I'm in my early 30s, I'm coming to peace with it.
I don't want to get into an argument at the bar with some old racist homophobic person.
I left the Midwest feeling like, "People are small-minded, they don't want to ask questions, they don't want to think out of the box." Some of that was true.
Iowans are super talkative, like me. I'm very talkative. I'm very curious about strangers.
You need to get out of your comfort zone, return to the Midwest, see some family, and, as cheesy as it sounds, work the land - plant some trees, maybe take up watercolor.
I lived in a small city on the Mississippi River across from Iowa, so I didn't have a country upbringing, but in high school we would go drink kegs in cornfields.
