Basically, radio hasn't changed over the years. Despite all the technical improvements, it still boils down to a man or a woman and a microphone, playing music, sharing stories, talking about issues - communicating with an audience.
I think it's important to really press on with the song writing and just go with it. There's no code, there's no craft... it's just let yourself shine through your music. If it's meant to be loved and heard, it'll happen.
I couldn't imagine a day without music. It relaxes and stimulates me in equal measure and I hate the sound of silence - the concept, I mean, not the track by Simon and Garfunkel.
It wasn't until my last year of college, 1976, that I decided well, maybe he's right. Delbert had been pushing me since high school to put 100% into my music.
It is surprising how many professional athletes, along with their families and friends, are gaga over movie and music stars, and the reverse is true with entertainers and sports stars.
There was always music playing in the house. I started singing at three, like my sisters did. When I was around four, we decided to put together a group and had so much fun with it.
Before our albums are released I feel like we still own it, that we have control over our music. But once it's out there in the world it's no longer ours.
I was never really a nerd. I'm not really into comic books or Dungeons and Dragons or any of that kind of stuff. I was in drama class, and I'm a big movie and music buff. And I'm into sports.
I tend to not want to put labels or categories on the music, only because people come with preconceived ideas about what they're going to hear, or won't come for this reason.
No one had ever told me that whites were supposed to sing one kind of music and blacks another - I sang what I liked in the only voice I had.
I think I definitely learned how to structure songs, just from listening to a lot of 1960s, 1970s pop music, although I'm sure my mother's watchful eye had a lot to do with it.
I think it's so dope that I'm here in Chicago and contributing to the music scene that's thriving. People are so happy Chicago's shining that everyone is willing to say 'I represent Chicago.' That wasn't always the case.
The way we're going about things and what we want to do, we feel it has to be a really pure essence of music. That's where you get the most out of it.
I realised a long time ago that instrumental music speaks a lot more clearly than English, Spanish, Yiddish, Swahili, any other language. Pure melody goes outside time.
Sometimes my boyfriend would write the lyrics and I would write the melody, and other times I would start from scratch. Or sometimes I would take a local poem and put that to music.
New Orleans is a place where people are deliberately undereducated so that they can be a labour class - the economy there is tourism, and one of the only outlets that black males have traditionally been allowed is to play jazz music, y'know?
I wondered how people would take me being a country music singer. I thought about deviating from that and singing other things. But... it doesn't really make sense for me to try to be something that I'm not.
My inner rock chick has always been there. I grew up listening to a lot of rock music through my sisters, who were teenagers while I was young, so they had control of the radio.
I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time.
Some artists and indie musicians see Spotify fairly positively - as a way of getting noticed, of getting your music out there where folks can hear it risk-free.
We all have such common ways to identify with each other, and I think when you approach music in that organic way, it's almost indescribable how it connects human to human and heart to heart.
