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I gave my voice to poetry.

I first started to sing when I started to talk. As soon as I could form words and sounds together, I was singing.

In my relationship with a young guy I was going with in a band - his name was Sylvester, and I think he had another little girl on the side - I told him, 'If you lose me, you're going to lose a good thing.' And I went home and put that poem to music.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

There was this girl who went to my school, and she did a Nikki Giovanni poem, 'Ego Tripping,' and it was just different from everyone else's. It wasn't flat recitation. It had an energy and a life to it. And it made me sit up in my seat, and my eyes got wide, and I really felt inside myself, 'She's making me feel things. I want to do that.'

More than anything, that's been the thread through my life - the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing.

When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large.

In the late 60s and early 70s, I did get interested in voices, and in narration and embodying the voice, making the poem sound like a real person talking.

I like singing now, but I didn't at the start. I didn't think about singing, didn't know how to do it, so I hit the ground stumbling.

I was once making a burger for myself at my boyfriend's house and a lyric started pouring out and I had to catch it, so I ran to another room to write it down, but then the kitchen caught fire. His cabinets were charred, and he was furious. But it was worth it for a song.