"I know—they treat it like it’s a big phenomena. It would be like, “all-girl band” or “girl drummer” and I’d be like, “Why can’t you just say drummer?” Female this, female that. It’s an oddity."

“My mother passed away in 2004, and then my dad 10 years later. That period in between, I wrote songs like “Death Came”, and then after my father passed away I wrote, “If There’s A Heaven” and “If My Love Could Kill”, which I wrote about the Alzheimer’s disease that killed my father. There’s a lot of dealing with loss, and heavy stuff, and life. It’s a lot different of an album than some of my earlier one’s, like Essence, when I was still struggling with unrequited love as a younger girl.”

“I was always into different kinds of music but just by default, I was singing and playing acoustic guitar; I didn’t know how to dance or anything. So it would take some time, over a year, for me to kind of progress into the stuff that I ended up doing later, the more Southern soul, country-rock, whatever-you-want-to-call-it kind of thing.”

“I think what informs my songwriting is my empathy with that. Maybe that’s what bothers people. It scares them to go to the edge of the well and look in. But it’s what they like also. And wouldn’t you rather feel the pain than not feel anything?”

“I grew up being aware that I was Southern, and that being a very important thing for me. And being drawn to short story writers, like Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty—the surroundings in their stories were so familiar to me, the whole Southern Gothic thing. That world only existed in that part of the country. It’s going to inform the personality of the songs. In a lot of my songwriting, I mention towns and places. It’s a culturally traditional thing in the South to tell stories.”