I'm a big fan of the Pre-Raphaelites. Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, and I realised recently that my music is Pre-Raphaelite in a certain way, in that it reinvents an older era and romanticises it, puts it in this gilded frame.
Every girl likes to just rock out when they put music on in their room - I learned that personally when fans would tell us how much they loved to make up their own dances to Cheetah Girls songs.
I wasn't writing the music. Ed would write a piece of music. I'd listen to it and come up with a melody and then we would arrange it. We'd put it together and I would write lyrics to my melodies.
Dance has always just been an extension of music for me. It's about putting my music into motion. It's just another dimension that I tap into with my music that not many artists do anymore.
They put me on the shift where they thought I could do the least harm, midnight to eight in the morning. Although the hours were lousy, they were perfect for an apprentice reporter.
I was getting to bed about 10 P.M. so wound up and not getting to sleep by 11, and because I was putting the prosthetics on for five hours, I had to be up at 3 in the morning.
I got put out of my church choir because my pastor said, 'We can't have baby sister singing the blues and coming in here and singing on Sunday morning.'
When I get up in the morning and put on a pink or a green wig, I see myself as a piece of animation. It lets me be the person I want to be, a person who's not embarrassed to have fun.
I never do anything that doesn't feel natural to me. I wake up in the morning and I know what to put on - it's my sixth sense, really.
Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.
I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood.
I like to be comfortable. And I think men tend to dress more comfortably than ladies. They can just put on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and I like doing that. Comfort first.
If you look through the shelves of science books, you'll find row after row of books written by men. This can be terribly off-putting for women.
Oh, if I could put some of my reckless spirit into these discreet cautious lazy men!
Oprah didn't want to put me on the show for a really long time because she thought I was more for the men than for the women.
I sing seriously to my mom on the phone. To put her to sleep, I have to sing 'Maria' from West Side Story. When I hear her snoring, I hang up.
My mom would put me in these preppy little suits and slick my hair to the side. I have these baby pictures of me where I'm this little preppy kid with a sweater tied around my neck.
Usually, whenever my mom would come over I would try and put on music that I thought she would like just to make her feel more at ease.
Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.
When I turned 18, my mom, my nana and I all went and had tattoos of our favorite Bible verses put on the inside of our wrists. Mine is 1st Timothy, 4:12.
A lot of moms give their kids line reads. My mom wasn't put in that position because I always had an acting teacher helping with the feelings rather than how to say something.
