How can you sing a line like, 'I've fallen out of love' when you're 18? You need to experience something of life before you can sing it.
You know Bakersfield was full of workers from the south, from Texas and Arkansas, and they brought their gospel and blues with them. And that's the sound I grew with.
I was in rehab for nine months, and I needed some solace and distraction. I was in town one day and I sort of stumbled into a jazz jam session, and kept going back.
One critic called me nothing but a blues singer, as though that was a slight. That is the highest compliment there is.
On stage, it's very naked. There's a reason you shake your knees. You're very vulnerable, cos it's just you, your body is the instrument. But I always had confidence in my voice, if I had the right song, the right words to sing.
Being a singer, it's feast or famine. You have to hit it when it's hot.
Even if you've being playing together for years, there'll always be something new. You're constantly back phrasing, front phrasing, singing faster, singing slower.
The umbrella of jazz is so big and so wide . If you don't like saxophone, try a vocalist, if you don't like vocalists, try guitar.
My overwhelming memory of my childhood is the constant busyness in the house. I am seventh out of eight kids - five boys and three girls - plus my mom, Ruth.
My sisters started to cook at nine and, being one of the youngest, I wanted in on it, too, so I began at six on potato-peeling duty as french fries were my thing.
I was quite shy as a child. My sisters were the gang leaders, my brothers were the enforcers and I was a tag-a-long.
My mother gave me the courage to pursue music as a career on her deathbed. She became very ill when I was 21. I didn't want her to worry about my future. I wanted her to know I'd finish my degree. But she pushed me to follow my dream, even if it wasn't the safe option.
Music that speaks of politics is less listened to than the music of partying, but it's still there.
There were some things in my childhood I thought we'd put to sleep. The idea of one race's supremacy over another. I thought the issue of colour would be put to sleep by the time I had a son. And that's maybe why I had a kid so late.
You'd think we'd be exhausted by that rhetoric but you're still able to move people with fear and fright and lies that somebody's going to take your place, that in order for someone to rise, you have to fall.
I'm very thankful to San Diego for the musical opportunities it gave me.
San Diego is where I really started to get my legs, musically.
'Take Me to the Alley' is about trying to uplift the lives of people who have been afflicted, maybe the homeless or somebody with an illness, or maybe they're refugees.
My grandmother and my mother and my grandfather, their style of praying was - all day long, they would pray by singing and humming.
I think part of my job as a songwriter is to go back in my memory and pull up those pains for other people because somebody else is going to come along who didn't have a good issue with their father.
