“I’m very emotional and vulnerable.”

When you start to have success, people look at you differently and expect more from you. With that comes a lot of pressure to perform, so it can be a little overwhelming.

When you first start out, people think this is super easy and you find your crew super quick. But you’ve really got to go through songwriter boot camp to find your people.

I grew up in Davenport, Iowa, but I moved to Santa Clarita, California, when I was 6.

I had all these singles come out within a two-month period, and then nothing for almost two years. You start to feel a little irrelevant. You realize how many people there are trying to be songwriters and how competitive it is and how political things can be.

If you listen to the radio, it’s all men who are emotional and women who are sexual. There’s nothing wrong with that! It definitely should be the case, but it makes me sad that women are afraid to be emotional because it makes them look weak.

I’m a very stimulated person.

I’ve written poetry most of my life.

Once I heard how deep music could touch people and what it can make you feel and all of these emotions it could bring out, I was really fascinated with it all.

I just want to write fun, interesting music that pushes boundaries and is still true to myself. I want people to feel something.

My boyfriend and I like to fight a lot. I have a lot of problems. He has a lot of problems. Somehow, we always work them out and find a way back to each other.

I definitely always thought of myself as a songwriter before a singer.

My sister was the singer, and I always had the mentality there could only be one in the family.

I just remember really loving words and writing about anything I could, and the way I’d remember things, like my library card number, was to make a melody.

If I get writer’s block – this is going to sound funny – I take a shower. Something about the water feels like I’m cleaning my brain as well as my body.

I just wanted to write the songs. I never wanted to sing them.

I think artists are aware that talking gives a songwriter so much material. If they just tell us what’s happening, it’s so much easier for us to write a song that’s specific to them.

Let’s take a short break from the outside world because you are emotionally unavailable.

I’m an emotional gangster. I cry once every month.

Kindness and healing is the only way for us to evolve emotionally.

Never be ashamed of expressing how you feel; being ashamed of emotional pain is as outlandish as being ashamed of shoulder pain. Your emotions are your truth; they are internal experiences that belong to you and no one has the right to criticize them.

Doing something that is productive is a great way to alleviate emotional stress. Get your mind doing something that is productive.

You get moments all the time that kind of make you pinch yourself, some of them make you quite emotional.

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same.

I suffer from depression. Severe cases of it. Not one case of depression, not a severe case, but severe cases of depression. Music is my only outlet, it’s therapeutic to me. It’s a release. It’s how I vent emotionally.