Everyone's just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it's a huge antidote to that to have a concept album.
For me, there's a fine line between telling a story that's fictional with lots of details and then removing yourself too much from it, so it's bloodless, a little too fictional.
I thought everything was interesting. I wanted to go scuba diving and I wanted to learn how to surf. Because I grew up in the 60s girls were not allowed to do anything. As I've gotten older and realized that women can do things like that I thought, 'Why not? Now's the time.'
If you're an artist trying to put out your own record on your own label, it's hard to get a distribution deal because no one wants to sign a deal with one entity. They want to sign distribution deals with labels, who have lots of product, lots of artists.
I have a 6-year-old, and his thing is to turn on Radio Disney in the car, and I get such an allergic reaction to listening to that music and the context into which it falls. I'm really working on him about that.
What's interesting to me is drama and conflict. Things aren't interesting without conflict and resolution of conflict - or striving towards a resolutions of conflict.
It's funny, because my last record was a lot about isolation and people living in separate worlds that other people can't even understand, which drug addiction is the perfect negative example of.
Everybody kind of understands, Oh yeah you take drugs and it does something to your brain and then you can't stop. It's easier to describe that shame, that horrible feeling of not being able to control your own life.