You can look at my palm and see the storm coming. Read the book of my life and see I've overcome it.

I know who I am. I am not perfect. I'm not the most beautiful woman in the world. But I'm one of them.

When I finally got sober, I moved towards what I might have been if I hadn't been destroying myself when I was young.

When I became a songwriter, it was out of some sort of desperation. I needed to create something. I had to latch on to something, and the guitar was what I grabbed.

I'm a big fan of Lou Reed, and I do a lot of talking through songs. It's more effective with my vocal limitations and also more powerful to slightly sing sometimes. It depends on the emotion, but I'm never going to try to compete with great singers.

My experience is that the universal is the personal. If you can get past your navel-gazing into the deepest part of yourself as a writer, you find everyone - we're all there.

I write to make some sense of things that confuse me. The mechanics of my own heart are the most confusing I know about - and don't know about - and other people's are a bit confusing, too.

I think we're very much in a mystery here in this life and that artists try to pierce the mystery with their art.

Ultimately, what I want is for my songs to outlive me: I want my songs to keep being played even after I'm gone.

I've come to terms with the fact that I'll probably be in therapy all of my life.

I guess I find it easier to talk when I have a guitar in front of me.

I got issues. Boy, have I got issues.

Songs have been my greatest teachers and continue to be really important in my life.

I think, because of the kind of writer I am, I can't do it halfway. I can't do it without dedicating my entire life to it. I have to give it a hundred percent.

Once I got my life sorted and started to get healthy, then I was able to focus on writing.

Creating something beautiful out of pain helps ease the pain. So, that's kind of how I got to songwriting - quite honestly out of desperation.

By the time I got to songwriting, I had been faced with a lot of troubles as a result of my own collective of trauma. I was someone who instinctively figured out that writing songs about the struggle helps you with the struggle.

There's a lot of vulnerability in songs - I'm not talking about pop songs - from people that are in the art of songwriting more than the commercial enterprise of it.

I always knew I was going to make a record called 'The Foundling.' Since I picked up a guitar, I knew it.

I feel as though I came to music with something to say. It wasn't like that when I was younger. I didn't have the ability to articulate what it was I wanted to say.

If I write for beauty and truth, the songs will find their way to me. Then, it's the songs that speak to the audience, and they can become part of the tribe that is into what I do.

What matters is what happens in the soul of an artist when you're playing.

I try not to eat cakes, but sugar screams my name.

I think I'll always draw from being a person that doesn't know how to have a normal life, whatever a normal life is.