I was born in Payson Utah and I grew up on an 800 acre homestead. A homestead means that before Alaska was a state, it was a territory, and people would come and give you land if you would settle there. They had 800 acres and they cleared a lot of it by hand, my grandfathers from Switzerland. So I was raised on that piece of land without running water, without electric heat, with a coal stove, milking the cow every morning, feeding the horses. We only ate what we raised. It was a very pioneer thing. It was hard. You'd wake up with frost on your eyelashes in the morning because the heat goes out every night and there's an outhouse, there's no shower and it was a hard living. At a very young age I cooked and took care of the family and did a lot of rigorous chores. In a way it was very romantic, in another way it was just a lot of hard work. I think I couldn't do this business unless I was raised the way I was raised. I think I would have lost my head, because it gives you an innate spirituality, it gives you a real focus on what is real in the world, what really matters in the world. So now when you get into the business and people are trying to act more famous than the next and bigger rock stars than the next, it's just a bunch of bull and it just kinda makes you giggle and people will get their lips puffed and their breasts puffed and its all just really funny especially when you just relate it and compare it to where I'm from.

I got a scholarship to study marble carving, fine art, dance, voice, stuff like that, and then graduated and floated around. Ended up in San Diego where my mom was and decided I'd come to a mid-life crises, or a pre-mid-life crisis, a teen-life crisis. Didn't know what I wanted to do with myself, I was really, really poor. I was really sick, Couldn't afford to buy water, much less medicine. We ended up living in our cars for about a year and I decided that I would do anything it took to do what I love. I didn't think that meant fame at all, I just wanted to make a living singing every night, which isn't hard. So I just sang in a coffee shop. It was the first time I played my material. Labels heard about it after a while. I had a good buzz and they drove down and I almost didn't do it - but I'm glad I did.

Living in her car...

I was actually .. by the time I lived in my car - that was actually an uplifting thing. I think the period before that was really hard, when I was a waitress and getting harassed at work, Scraping food off people's plates so I could eat, stealing toilet paper, shoplifting toothpaste, things like that. I think that was really depressing. I suppose because $500 a month had to go into rent and not into food and it all just seemed really unfair. So by the time I got my car is seemed like freedom. I was used to simple living so it seemed really great to me and I felt that my thoughts were so fearful, so constantly that it had to be perpetuating my experience and I decided as an experiment to try and turn my thoughts around and try and look where is change possible instead of 'why is everyone against me?', because you can't fight despair it just makes you idle and useless. So I tried to be 'what can I do', 'what do I want' even, 'what would I do for the world if I could'. As soon as I started doing that it just changed everything.and my song-writing was a lot about that, like 'Who will save your soul' and a lot of those earlier songs I wrote.
My goal wasn't to be signed, I never thought I was very good, particularly, so I was really surprised when people said 'you could do a record'. I mean - good people do records, I'm just a kid trying to get by. My main problem was I thought I'd just found Utopia, I was really having a great time in that coffee shop and really affecting people in a way that I enjoyed and it was affecting me in a way that I enjoyed and I didn't want to join the shark infested business of the record industry. I wasn't interested in being part of what I hated. But I did prayer in my van to help people feel not as alone as I'd felt in my life, to try and help people who can't eat every night. And so I thought - if it is an opportunity to do that I shouldn't look it in the mouth and ignore it. And so I had my mom working with me and she knows all of my principles, my beliefs, and we sort of approached the business with a different slant, and it's worked really well. I've never had to compromise anything that I believe or hold dear to me. Everything's worked kinda around it. It took a lot of work. I toured for five years without any record airplay. But it was worth it.

On touring...

That was always my trump card. I was never a cool act, you know, I don't have a band and I don't get cool haircuts. I'm just not that geared towards hip-ness. When my music came out Nirvana was still king and Pear Jam and Soundgarden, so a girl player on acoustic guitar wasn't that interesting to people. The kids did respond, but radio wouldn't respond and I don't think touring was a conscious choice so much as a necessity. I also believed I wanted a long-term following and audiences are so fickle because they don't have any live connection. So that means touring a lot to get a loyal fan base.

Poetry...

It was first. I started writing poetry long before I started writing music. It's my love. I really love poetry. I love reading poetry. Because I was raised without electricity and stuff, listening to music wasn't a big part of my diet, reading was a huge part of my diet. So I learned a lot about human nature, human behaviour, human relationships by reading poetry. So I was really tickled to put out a book of poetry. It was really frightening but I was really excited to do it. My fear is I worship brilliant poets and I'm nowhere near that. I think that's any artist's fear. I have the same fear as a musician - there's such great music out there you don't want to add to the pile. But I am glad. It was also because I've sold ten million records here in the US I'm up for a lot of criticism for switching mediums and so I knew the press would jump on it a lot harder and a lot more critically. So I was going to make a book that was really fiercely critic-proof and had just the perfect poetry in it and it would have been a lot thinner, but I decided I wanted kids to understand the evolution, the development, a young woman developing, a spirit developing, emotions developing. So I put in a broader selection and I'm glad because the kids really do seem to be getting that.

Her mother is her manager...

Mom was always really involved with my development, since I was a young child she'd tell me things that really mattered and not things that didn't matter, and I was always aware that there were a lot of adults in the world that didn't know anything. They just kept getting by day-to-day and they would tell you things that were full of shit. So she would always tell me things that meant something, that would give me a better understanding and insight into human nature and into myself. This has all really been an extension of that. She really helps me. Like when I was just getting press, when I was eighteen or nineteen, they were all going 'oh you're very wise, you're precocious for your age'. I was flattered as hell, I was going 'well thankyou - I was born this way - pretty brilliant, huh' . I was really desperate, starved for the complement and my mom said 'you really have to quit doing this'. I was really defensive and I said well 'I am this way and some people appreciate it, so there'. She said 'you can do what you want, but if you keep acting like you weren't taught how to be the how you are, people won't understand how to become like you and you'll be a stranger to yourself because you're making yourself up'. I could have spent years going down this path of needing the press' attention and instead in five minutes it was quelched. I was really thankful and she's always been like that and helped me exist emotionally and creatively at the same time as my career has developed.

On women finally getting recognition...

I think the climate of what people want in America has really changed. I think that if you look at music as a mirror of the social consciousness of youth, it's always struggling with the dilemma of the present. With Elvis it was a rebellious, let-down-your hair, kind of rock 'n' roll, getting un-rigid out of the fifties. The sixties was political as well as love and all that kind of stuff. The seventies was going into disillusionment, the eighties was a pretty serious disillusionment and baby-boomer's materialism, and the music is all reflecting that, all the bands of that era. And then into the nineties and the kids saying 'I feel awful, I don't know who I am, I don't know who God is, I don't know who politicians are, and I feel like shit'. And that was the music, that was grunge. But you can't stay there forever music and youth has to move on, has to say 'what do I do about it?'. And I think when you get into that process it's sort of an emotional journey you have to start going 'who am I?', 'what am I?', 'what do I want', 'how do I have an influence'. And I think that historically men haven't been allowed to be very emotional or very inciteful in those areas. They've been told to be tough and providing and all those things. So it just makes sense to me that women would have a bit of a head start on the emotional realm of discovery and those kinds of things.

On variety, acting...

It's essential. Unless I'm teetering on the edge of failure I don't feel sufficiently challenged. So I really have to. Also, creativity is a body, singing and songwriting is just one limb and if the rest begins to atrophy and feel unused. It even makes the source that I draw on to write music diminish. So I think the more things I can do and be exposed to creatively, the greater the resource I have to draw off to write music. I just get bored, I toured my record for five years, it was dreadfully tedious. So I was really ready to do a film and to write, it was just time for a change.

On acting...

It was tremendously different, very difficult, because the pacing is different. With a show your body doesn't wake up until six at night. You go on stage at nine. You explode for four hours. You're exhausted at the end of it. You go to sleep. Film is like - you get up at four in the morning, which is just ludicrous to me. Sit in make-up for two hours while you're falling asleep which is a nightmare to me. And then you have to sustain yourself from six in the morning until midnight and have the same energy that you did at six in the morning. So, sustaining yourself is really different. But it's a good craft. It's not the most creative thing that I've ever done but it's technically really fascinating and really a cool thing to act and imitate most things. But if I was an actor, I'd be really frustrated. But part of my make-up is I like to be with people to write. Music is so much more looked to for guidance than politics or religion even at this point, with kids. You can be on stage, every musician loves that, and touch people directly, immediately. No media has to be there, you're on-stage, they're in front of you and it's your thing. With acting it takes two years to get it to the public and it's not even you, you're being somebody else. So I think it would be frustrating if I was an actor all the time.