Music can be healing, and with my history and my knowledge of both sides of what looks like a gigantic divide in the world, I feel I can point a way forward to our common humanity again.
If I have one success in my relationship history, it's with the people who listen to my music. I think that they'll be there with me forever, and I'll be there with them forever. And I'm totally satisfied with that.
I use computers for email, staying current with my own website as well as finding important information through other websites. I also use it for creating MP3 files of new music I'm working on.
People send me CDs all the time because I love music. It's great. I listen to them in my dressing room or in my car.
The artistic side of our family was very important because one person encourages the other. It was a vey enlightening place to be as a kid because of all the music and dancing, and my dad played banjo; my sisters played piano and sang.
Before breaking into music, I had various jobs: forklift driver, driving a courier. But I was forced into working rather than doing it off my own bat because that was my dad's way: you got a job and paid your way.
I was actually under a lot of heaviness when I was younger. I thought of myself as an old soul. I was very obsessed with death. Basically, I didn't really have a youth - I sublimated all that into my identity and my music.
People thought me a bit strange at first; a blond haired, blue-eyed Norwegian who sang Mexican folk songs, but I used it to my advantage and got a job. And so the music became my ticket to education.
My first introduction to African music was by my mother, who bought the 'Pata Pata' album by the great Miriam Makeba when it came out. Now that is an album. What a voice.
I'm a keen musician. Me and my mates have a great times jamming and recording stuff. We have a great band behind us and have turned my nursery-rhyme songs into quite credible pieces of music.
Acting - I'm good at it, but it's not my passion. Music, I'm not as good at, but that's my passion. I think I'm just going to go with the flow, wait until one picks up, and take the opportunities one at the time.
I always wrote music for my friends, but my focus was on playing piano. I didn't think I'd be quite good enough to be a soloist, but I believed that if I worked hard enough, I could work as a player, a teacher.
Ideals are not something I can control. It's not logic that convinces me of something, it's what my heart says. My heart has a way of involving me in things, which can only be good for the music.
I had to learn my faith and look after my family, and I had to make priorities. But now I've done it all and there's a little space for me to fill in the universe of music again.
My musical director, Mark Cherry, is the most wonderful person who ever lived on God's good green Earth. He's my director, he does the arrangements. Really, he does everything - including certain janitorial chores!
I love the company of actors, but the crazier it gets, the more I've come to realise how valuable my time is with my friends who work on the land or are builders or, you know, make music. Work in offices. Run shops.
I love clubbing - the abandon of it, the release of dancing, and being with my friends and the people I love. For me, it's never been about going out to meet guys or to show off my latest dress - it's the music.
My students frequently ask what their next project should be. My advice: immerse yourself in the music you love and you will find what you want to do; you will discover your next project.
I don't have that kind of voice, the big baritone or rousing tenor sound. My wheelhouse was in the frothier pieces. So my appreciation for those older musicals and revivals grew.
I wouldn't say no to other kinds of musical opportunities. I guess that it just depends on what it was or what it required me to do, and if I felt that it compromised my own soul.
All my memories seem to happen to music. Memories of my mother and father; waking up early on Christmas morning; the little apartment we lived in above the disco.
