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I have always been a singer, a writer, and a musician, not as a prodigy or as in a trade handed to me by my parents, but because of an inner voice or maybe a command from beyond reality as it is usually defined.

Temperament can really take a toll on the voice. If you get tight in your body with the acting, then you can get tight in your voice. And then you can get tired, and you can damage yourself vocally.

I get to study and I got to mimic and what I basically did was I stole from every person that I could steal from. I was an imitator. That's what I was. It was years before I could take all of these things that I loved about all of these different artists and put them together and find my voice.

I think, for a long time, people just did not know what to do with me. I looked like a Barbie doll, and then I had this voice like I spend my life in a bar, and I said things that were alarming and had ideas that didn't make sense.

It may not necessarily reflect my current frame of mind. Sometimes I have to put myself at the point in time of the voice that I'm trying to sing with.

I have a feeling that about 90% of my life has been shaped by my voice, both as an embarrassment and as an advantage. There was always the terrible incongruity of this deep voice barreling out of this little body. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware that it was ludicrous, that it took on an importance that wasn't really there.

I always defined myself in terms of my talkativeness, and being without a voice hits me in a number of ways.

If you are a singer and you lose your voice, you realize that you have other skill sets when that is taken out of the equation.

Part of me sees myself as talented, and the other part sees me as strange. Ideas get stuck in your head and nothing changes them. Not even fame.