Man, y'know, I'm a music guy. I like a lot of different things. It depends on the time of the day and the situation.
Austin is a big music town, so growing up, I had a lot of local heroes. Toni Price I was very, very into; she was one of the first people I tried to emulate. She's a local Austin blues artist. Marsha Paul I was also a very big fan of.
The William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh... was the place where Champagne Music was born.
One time I introduced my orchestra as the Shampoo Music Makers instead of the Champagne Music Makers.
I don't sing country music because I'm not capable of singing other kinds of music; I sing it because I think it's the most beautiful kind of music there is.
But I'm also a music lover, and I'll always try a lot of different things.
And to me, I had come out of Texas, and during that time was when I realized that a lot of people in Nashville, their idea of what country music was was not the same as mine.
I came to town thinking that everybody had the same idea of what country music was that I did.
I'm a businesswoman. I am a music lover. I like for people to like my music. When you listen to top 40 radio, you hear pop stuff. You hear rock stuff. You hear all these different influences.
So you do shorter versions of the hits, or you take out a long guitar solo or things like that to make time for the hits and new music as well. But I don't think any of us ever get to do as much new music as we would like to.
Honestly, I don't listen to nobody else's music but my own. It's kind of like sports to me. You don't see Kobe Bryant at a LeBron James game - he just works on his own game. And that's what I do. I only listen to me, so I can criticize and analyze an...
I believe that music is another form of news. Music is another form of journalism to me so I have to cover all the areas with my album.
I believe music should reflect yourself in some way and not just yourself at the given time. I feel that when you die or when you're going, someone's supposed to listen to that music and know everything about you. And I just try to get that across.
But I don't believe in organised politics, organised religion, organised music, organised anything.
If you went to see me today, you might not like my music.
Soul music is pain - you can hear the slaves, the beatin' and the hurtin'.
It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.
Knowing what I knew about Russia, as much as I loved the music and was fascinated by the songs and the whole idea of it, I knew it would be a very lengthy and frustrating process.
We just kind saw the images and knew the cliches, so to have the opportunity to go there and learn something about Russian music and about Russian people and to see things apart from being a tourist.
I thinks it really interesting how they throw the world music samples in there. I often wonder what it would be like to do something like that, but use my lyrics and my kind of style.
My thing is music, period.
