My parents were music lovers and collectors. It was around.

I'm still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me.

My first love was the sound of guitar.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.

I think the women - Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu - are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music.

I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.

My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

I'm not a jazz singer.

I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.

I was a guitar player first off.

Over time, I have come to believe that there is a killer and a saint in all of us. But...I choose to focus on the future and the *potential* in people.

Instead of trying to understand Life, we must live it. Create a reason to Live and progress on that path every day.

Glory in your small dreams, because inside them something bigger may emerge.

I just have a hard time displaying things.

The way you lose the gospel is not by denying it, but by assuming it.

My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing 'The Aeneid' and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit.

Jesus but people got weird when they lived alone.

You know, in the WikiLeaks cables, the Chinese discovered that Kevin Rudd was urging the Americans to keep the military option open against them. This is hardly a friendly gesture.

I have been a multitude of shapes, Before I assumed a consistent form.

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.