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Sometimes I get a lyric, and the lyric, you know, comes off the page, and goes into my brain and comes out with a melody. Other times, I may create a melody first.

There are some songs where I'll have had the music for 20 years and then finally the lyric will come through. That's not common but it does happen. Then there are other songs that come really quickly.

As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time.

Most of the time, the lyrics are kind of like my secret messages to my friends or my boyfriend or my mom or my dad. I would never tell them that these songs are about them or which specific lyric is about somebody. Often, when I sit down to write a lyric, it is in the heat of the moment, and something has just happened.

I get a different kind of lyric from someone else that might make me go in a different musical direction.

Then, once I have lyrics, being able to shape them around a song is nothing new for me, I've been doing that for 25 years. The soul searching part of it, the spontaneous part of it, that was, and remains, a really terrific process.

I think the melody is the first time I hear in a song and if I like the melody, then I'll pay closer attention to the lyrics.

It's weird to try to write lyrics for somebody else. They can't really get behind what you're saying or what you want them to say because they didn't experience it.

It's very rare that a song falls from your mind complete.

Really, music is what I'm interested in, and the lyric part of it came from just having to have something to sing.