My dad is a Chatty Cathy, the social butterfly; friendly; knows everybody in the whole world by six degrees; tells me that every performance is the greatest he’s ever seen, every new outfit is the coolest. Constant cheerleader.
My audience has really become a very diverse group of people. It’s not just 15-year-old girls. That’s kind of what allows me to write from all the different places I want to write from.
It’s human nature to not say everything that’s on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We’re afraid of being embarrassed.
It doesn’t bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs – because at least they’re looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.
I’ve never gotten thick skin. If you close yourself off and you get this protective armor, there is a price you pay with that – of not feeling. And feeling is important when you are a songwriter.
I’ve been on tour since I was 16, and I always do meet-and-greets before and after shows, so you kind of build these friendships with people. I have girls come up to me and tell me exactly what’s going on in their love lives.
I’m not concerned with people seeing me in a certain way. Some people see me as a kid, some people see me as an adult. But I’m seriously not going to complain how anybody sees me, as long as they see me.
Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person.
So many girls come up and say to me, ‘I have never listened to country music in my life. I didn’t even know my town had a country-music station. Then I got your record, and now I’m obsessed.’ That’s the coolest compliment to me.
When you say, ‘I spent my summers at the Jersey Shore,’ people always say, ‘Oh, really?’ They think of the TV show. So I just say, ‘A cute little harbor town in New Jersey.’
When you say ‘control freak’ and ‘OCD’ and ‘organized,’ that suggests someone who’s cold in nature, and I’m just not. Like, I’m really open when it comes to letting people in. But I just like my house to be neat, and I don’t like to make big messes that would hurt people.
When I’m writing a record, I kind of don’t listen to much music. Just because I want to be inspired solely on the emotion; just based on how it feels.
When I’m in management meetings when we’re deciding my future, those decisions are left up to me. I’m the one who has to go out and fulfill all these obligations, so I should be able to choose which ones I do or not. That’s the part of my life where I feel most in control.
When I’m getting to know someone, I look for someone who has passions that I respect, like his career. Someone who loves what he does is really attractive.
When I was younger we had a grape arbor, and my mom would go out and pick grapes and make grape jam in the sink – boil it, put it in jars, and give it away as gifts.
When I look at acting careers that I really admire, I see that it’s been a precise decision-making process for these people. They make decisions based on what they love, and they do only the things that they are passionate about. They play only characters that they can’t stop thinking about.
When I listen to a song, I don’t say, ‘Oh my gosh, that vocal line she sang was the best thing I ever heard.’ I’m thinking, ‘That lyric just moves me. That lyric just said what I feel better than I could say it myself.’
When I figured out how to work my grill, it was quite a moment. I discovered that summer is a completely different experience when you know how to grill.
What makes me happy is just curling up in with my mom in her bed and watching a marathon of ‘CSI’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ episodes with pints of ice cream.
There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.