Even though we're a week and a half away from Thanksgiving, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.
The whole point of me doing a Christmas record and what I centered it around was the song 'Christmas with You' from the point-of-view of the soldiers in Iraq.
I know that a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania is about the most random place for a country singer to come from, but I had an awesome childhood.
At Christmas, it's my siblings running around the house, we're cooking, talking, laughing, loud and just crazy. It's beautiful chaos.
When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.
When I grew up, people said, 'You'll never be the man your dad was.' And I said, 'Gee, I hope not.'
I used to drink tons of caffeine. Now I make smoothies with frozen berries and Green Vibrance health powder.
You look at public education system, charter schools, infrastructure, in so many ways New Orleans has come back stronger.
I stupidly ignored education completely. I found it dull and I preferred to cause chaos and have fun. I regret this massively now.
Martin Luther King was a misguided leader. He worked to be recognized as the leader of black America when what black America needs isn't a leader, it is education.
My parents had an old-fashioned ideal of college, that four years at a liberal arts college should be a liberal arts education.
I don't come from a lot of money and wasn't going to get an academic scholarship, so the only way to afford an education was to allow the military to supplement it.
Obviously, education is hugely important, along with healthcare. They're the basics and you're hurting your own country if you don't pour money into them.
I left school at 15 feeling fairly useless and not really up to scratch in my education. And I still suffer sometimes from that lack of education.
Albuquerque is my home. I want my kids and all of our children to be able to go to any public or charter school and receive an excellent education.
American society will never completely understand the true meaning of equality.
Marriage equality is about more than just marriage. It's about something greater. It's about acceptance.
Looking for equality everywhere is a huge mistake because equals are terrible and boring. But a sense of fairness and justice is a totally different thing and a much more complex thing.
For a modern woman it is important to be supported and that there is equality in every aspect, and that it's not two halves that make a whole - it's two wholes that make a whole.
We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
The word 'equality' shows up too much in our founding documents for anyone to pretend it's not the American way.
