Guitarists From The United States

"You don't have to prove Your manhood to me constantly. I know you're the man can't you see? I love you, righteously."

"I would rather suffer sweet silent solitude, Deathly defiant from drowning out. Filthy sounds stumbling, ugly and cruel Between the lips of your beautiful mouth.Deep down within me words move in phases, Frozen and still until they decide To melt and drip over the pages, Until that moment they live inside."

"There's a place in my heart, I got room to spare. There's a place in my heart, I made room for you there. Even though you make me blue, I've got room enough for you. No matter what you do, I want you to know that You have a place in my heart."

"Sun came up it was another day, And the sun went down you were blown away. Why'd you let go of your guitar? Why'd you ever let it go that far? Drunken angel."

"Not a day goes by I don't think about you; You left your mark on me, it's permanent, a tattoo. Pierce the skin and the blood runs through, Oh my baby."

"I am waiting here for more. I am waiting by your door. I am waiting on your back steps. I am waiting in my car. I am waiting at this bar. I am waiting for your essence."

"There are things about you that make me wanna scream and shout. There are things about you that make me wanna lock you out. But there's a little thing that drives me wild, Something that happens every time you smile. I can't get over the lines around your eyes, Lines around your eyes every time you smile."

"He sleeps all alone on Second Street With a roof over his head and food to eat. But he can hardly make it day to day cause Everything he wants is six blocks away, six blocks away."

"Just a shakin' in my knees, just a cold chill. Don't know what it is, just call it a thrill. Just a lump in my throat, just hot blood. Don't know what it is, some call it love."

"I would risk the serpent's bite. I would dance around with seven. I would kiss the diamond back, If I knew it would get me to heaven.'Cause I want to get right with God. Yes, you know you got to get right with God."

"Open up the doors of heaven and let me in. I think I'm finally tired of living, let me in. I'm going to walk into glory, Tell everyone my story. So open up the doors of heaven and let me in.I've tried to live my life the righteous way. I tried to do my best from day to day. But no matter how hard I try, Seems all I do is cry. So open up the doors of heaven and let me in."

"My mother passed away in 2004, and then my dad 10 years later. That period in between, I wrote songs like “Death Came”, and then after my father passed away I wrote, “If There’s A Heaven” and “If My Love Could Kill”, which I wrote about the Alzheimer’s disease that killed my father. There’s a lot of dealing with loss, and heavy stuff, and life. It’s a lot different of an album than some of my earlier ones, like Essence, when I was still struggling with unrequited love as a younger girl."

"I grew up being aware that I was Southern, and that being a very important thing for me. And being drawn to short story writers, like Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty—the surroundings in their stories were so familiar to me, the whole Southern Gothic thing. That world only existed in that part of the country. It’s going to inform the personality of the songs. In a lot of my songwriting, I mention towns and places. It’s a culturally traditional thing in the South to tell stories."

"I was always into different kinds of music but just by default, I was singing and playing acoustic guitar; I didn’t know how to dance or anything. So it would take some time, over a year, for me to kind of progress into the stuff that I ended up doing later, the more Southern soul, country-rock, whatever-you-want-to-call-it kind of thing."

"I think it's important, if you are an artist, to use your music to stand up for what you believe in…That's what everyone should do with their lives…stand up for what they believe in, or try to do some good in the world. I don't think artists have a greater responsibility than anyone else."

"I think people are foolish to believe that there won’t be major social changes in this country before we possibly, ultimately, destroy ourselves…There’s only so far you can push people before they start to push back, and I’ve seen that in my life. That’s where the things I write about come from. It’s wrong not to encourage people to hope or to dream or even to consider what’s thought to be impossible. That’s the only thing that keeps people alive sometimes. For me and my family, that was one of the only things that kept us going."

"I know—they treat it like it’s a big phenomena. It would be like, “all-girl band” or “girl drummer” and I’d be like, “Why can’t you just say drummer?” Female this, female that. It’s an oddity."

"I think what informs my songwriting is my empathy with that. Maybe that’s what bothers people. It scares them to go to the edge of the well and look in. But it’s what they like also. And wouldn’t you rather feel the pain than not feel anything?"

"The time I enjoy music most is when it’s not a performance. It’s just trading instrumentals and finding that part in the song that you feel best singing."

"Music brought me closer to the idea of God…Music gave me the energy to revise, revive myself; renew, rebirth myself. It was a palliative, a relief."

"As a child…I always had a sense of social conditions and political situations. I think it had to do with the fact that my mother was always discussing things with my sister and me — also because I read a lot. A lot of people in similar situations just have a sense that they’re poor or disenfranchised, but they don’t really think about what’s created the situation or what factors don’t allow them to control their lives."

"I pretended I was Cat Stevens. I started out with very Cat Stevensy chords, very abrupt. I was so stuck in the moment of being fearful so as a lesson to myself I said: ‘but we can never know about the days to come’. I didn’t know when the door-bell was going to ring. I liked that. It was all of a sudden a quarter to eight and I had written the whole song."

"Fear came in so much in my life that it did everything but completely stop me. When I was a little girl, I so wanted to be sociable, but I was scared that I wasn't going to be able to speak a sentence because I had such a bad stammer..."

"It seems to me that that image was created for female folk singers because they actually had a lot more control than other women in the music scene…They wrote their own songs, they played them, they performed by themselves — there you have a picture of a very independent person, and trying to make them seem emotional and fragile and all puts a softer edge on it. As if there was something wrong with being independent."

"The night's too long; It just drags on and on. And then there's never enough. That's when the sun starts coming up. Don't let go of her hand, You just might be the right man. She loves the night, She loves the night, She doesn't want the night Don't want it to end."

"…I would say it's not not about Warren Beatty. But I can't understand why there's been such intense interest about this over the years and I don't really want to play into that. To me, it's not an issue. It's a kind of a fun riddle."

"You know, that's so much a part of life, being able to embrace the broken heart, not just cast it off as having no meaning or trying to get rid of it. I think in the book gives a very good journey through the way I handled things that were desperately frightening for me."

"I grew up with lots of mystery in my house…I was always feeling on shaky ground when I was growing up. I didn’t know what was what, and that led me to feel very insecure."

"I think of that time a lot…It’s part of my blood, my bones, all the liquid in my body. I’ve just taken him in so he’s in my core."

"Do I want too much? Am I going overboard to want that touch? I shouted out to the night: "Give me what I deserve, cause it's my right!""

"I like a certain amount of tension in music…I like the kind of music that maybe makes you think about the status quo."

"It was the tip of the iceberg…There’s some unseen wall of faceless men that I have to climb over…as if on a mission."

"The image a lot of people have of me as detached, impassive, or remote is a persona that comes from years of being teased for every feeling I ever expressed."

"If people are listening, you can feel this intense concentration, and it builds a level of trust…I can be vulnerable in a way that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to be if I was just talking. There’s something about music and electricity and the free-flowing, less-contained aspect – it’s like being in the ocean. What’s the inside and what’s outside?"

"I don't wanna think that I'm influential or an icon or blah blah blah blah...Ultimately, I feel most confident when I'm just working. Thinking about ideas. That's how I'm most comfortable. Or performing in a group situation."

"When I was growing up in the seventies, there were more open spaces. There weren't McMansions really. L.A. always had an interesting array of architecture in the houses. Like one would be a ranch house, another could be a Tudor house. It is fitting that there are all these different styles that almost were predetermined by L.A. being a place where different people moved."

"Well, it sort of bothers me that if a man is doing it, then it's fine. Like, if a woman had Bob Dylan's voice, how far would she have gotten? Or Leonard Cohen? And men can get away with saying more things that are—I don't know, it's kind of like, everyone could sit around and pat each other on the back. And that's not very interesting."

"I never think of myself as famous anyway, like, if anything, it’s barely famous."

"Your life is hard to change. But at the same time, I've also always felt that I'm the same person now as I was at five, so I've been sort of reaching out to that too, in a way."

"I don’t, really. I mean, the one thing is more women playing music. That allows you to have different personalities, so it kind of cuts through the clichés about how women are perceived. But I don’t really think things in the mainstream have changed so much. In the underground, it seems like there’s a lot more women involved in the scene, which mostly comes out of male record collectors, so it was surprising in the late ’80s to start seeing more girls and women involved with experimental music as that scene grew. That’s pretty cool.”"

"“It was right around Christmas… and it was kind of too expensive for me to try to fly back from Australia to the U.S. on holiday prices, so I just decided to stay in that side of the world. I went to Malaysia instead…I thought it would be a great vacation, but I went alone, and I went during the holidays when everyone else is spending time with their families, and so, long story short, I ended up feeling incredibly, devastatingly alone… I think of myself as, you know, a very solitary, kind of introverted person, so I didn’t plan for loneliness, and then it just happened and I didn’t know what to do about it. So I wrote a song.”"

"I think there is in my previous albums a very useful romanticization or glorification of a sadness...wherein Be the Cowboy, there's a realization that no one gives a shit that you're sad, and you're still sad. Your sadness is no longer profound, and you're still sad. It's that kind of growing up and realizing that it's not cool anymore to be sad, but you're still sad."

"“…it was actually about when you have some kind of toxic relationship to yourself, or to another person, for so long that it becomes your identity. Even when you don't need it anymore and you've stepped away from it, you still hold on to it because it's scary to let it go — because if you actually let it go, it feels like erasing yourself. That song is about likening that sort of toxicity to a pearl.”"

"“The phrase ‘Be the cowboy you want to see in the world’ has been an inside joke between me and myself…I would always kind of say it to myself in situations where I feel like I’m sort of trapped in my own mind. Like, ‘Oh, what would a swaggering, western movie cowboy do in this situation?’”"

"“I think it's a very feminine album…There can be something incredibly violent about being a woman and having desires as a woman – not so nice, not so soft. And I think that's an interesting experience to draw on…""

""I think the theme that I unfortunately saw—unfortunately for me—was the theme of loneliness or the idea of being alone…And the idea of being alone, not because the world is forcing you to be alone but because you are the person causing your aloneness…”"

"I wouldn’t say it’s an alter ego, but I have anxiety around social situations, and I don’t like going to parties…As a performer, onstage I know my place. I’m sure of myself. There’s no doubt. It’s just existing, and it’s so lovely to get to be for an hour."

"People think I was writing it for a group of people, when actually I was writing about one person. The truth was, I loved this person so much, and us being from different worlds kept getting in the way."

"“You always want what you can’t have, and that all-American thing, from the day I was born, I could never enter that dream. That all-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained. So yes, it’s a sad song, but I wanted to make sure it reflected all of the contrasting feelings. You can be heartbroken about a relationship, but also, from it, realize you are you and you’re okay with who you are, or where you came from.”"

"“…A lot of the ‘yous’ in my songs are abstract ideas about music...I will neglect everything else, including me as a person, just to get to keep making music…And even if it actually sometimes hurts, it doesn’t matter as long as I get to be a musician.”"