Quotes

When I was wiping down the tables, I always dreamt about travel. I would get to the end of a night shift and wonder what it was like in wonderful places around the world. I have been to a lot of them now and that has been great. But I'm just happy that I can sustain a living doing something I love. Music doesn't have to be fancy. I work hard and enjoy the fact that people want to come to my shows. That's simple, but I'm pretty blue-collar about it.

I was rejected for couple of adverts for sounding too sad. One was for Diet Coke, but it's a good thing it didn't happen because it probably would have been a big blight on my soul. It also happened with a fabric softener called 'Downy', and I guess the way I sang 'Only Downy' made people weep. They said, 'We don't want people to cry about fabric softeners'.

Having a sense of what is close to the bone can develop empathy and compassion in you, and they are really important tools to have. Somehow I don't think I would have any of that without having grown up the way I grew up and done things like waiting on tables. These are important things to me, and in some of my work I am trying to say that you don't get to have this forever, and to just remember that this is a short period of time we're here, so you have to get it right.