Things can be really empty in this world, and I don't just mean the music world. It can become a very meaningless place if you don't really understand: 'who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing?' To feel fulfilment and have a deeper level of understanding, personally, that is the most important thing.

When I was first learning songs, I'd have a favorite song, and I'd take the chords and twist them around. I'd learn the chords and then play them backward. That was my first experimenting with writing a song.

We have the potential to help people out of poverty, out of disease, out of slavery and out of conflict. Too often, we turn the other way because we think there's nothing we can do.

I find myself to be truly primal and passionate. Everything I do comes from a primal place.

My imagination is a twisted place.

I have a huge, active imagination, and I think I'm really scared of being alone; because if I'm left to my own devices, I'll just turn into a madwoman.

The openness of rural Nebraska certainly influenced me. That openness, in a way, fosters the imagination. But growing up, Lincoln wasn't a small town. It was a college town. It had record stores and was a liberal place.

If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.