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I had a lot of romanticised ideas of what Detroit was like, but I didn't get there until I was 30, and it was very different than I had imagined it.

I think me leaving Detroit shaped my style. Me leaving, going to New York, going to L.A. and seeing what they were doing there. I think that inspired me more than what people were doing back home.

I went on to Cincinnati. I had got a taste of the big cities and them bright lights. I stayed there until I was about 18 or 19 and then I went on to Detroit.

I went to hockey camp at Michigan because my dad has some relatives in the Ann Arbor area. We went to visit them as kids, and you start to learn the language from being around people. At the same time, when I got to college, I thought my English was better than it really was. I learned a lot over my four years.

I got to do something I never do, which is go to Starbucks and read 'The New York Times' until 7 a.m. I took my daughter to school on the East Side, which was a lot of fun. And I admit I played Call of Duty, one of those war video games.

Things were a lot simpler in Detroit. I didn't care about anything but boyfriends.

I also developed an interest in sports, and played in informal games at a nearby school yard where the neighborhood children met to play touch football, baseball, basketball and occasionally, ice hockey.

I went to school in Gainesville because it was a huge punk and folk town. So I went to class twice a week, and then I went to shows and wrote. I did a lot of music writing before I actually started playing music.