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My success set me up for life, and it meant that I could retire from the music industry at 27 to spend time with my newborn daughter and my wife. My time away from the spotlight allowed me to rediscover my love for music, and I'm doing it for me now and no one else.

My mother's passion for something more, to write a different destiny for a dirt-poor farmer's daughter, was to shape my entire life.

My 20s was a time for self-exploration and, okay, a little self-indulgence.

I was on a path that could've really led to disaster, and the one thing for me that really kept me focused and gave me something to believe in and a sense of self-worth and a discipline was music.

For me, my 20s were all about reaching for the brass ring of work in theater, television, and film, surviving in between by waiting tables, painting houses, serving coffee, and temping.

I gave up the idea of having a career when I was 24. Sounds glamorous, but I've been doing things since then, and part of those adventures was to make films because I realised I was actually quite good at it and I enjoyed it.

I find my greatest happiness in thinking of those days in Homestead when I labored to bring a thing to perfection entirely by myself. In the evenings, I would go into the hills and look down on my work, and I knew that it was good, and my heart was elated.

I think I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth - I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace.

Essentially, I spent most of my childhood with my mother and my older sister, and I suppose I had rather a romantic vision of how things might be if there were men around; I saw myself in a country house with six children and a garden. That has never been achieved - and I still regret it.

I gave everything in my career so I have no regrets at all.