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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.

The way I teach people to sing... I have them talk the lyric out until it sounds like something they really believe, like an actor with a monologue.

I was the youngest of three kids, and from the age of four, singing was my way of getting attention.

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.

There's a lot of things that are said on the American Idol message board. I quit reading them because most of the people are very mean.

The whole 'American Idol' way of looking at things is the antithesis of what I grew up with. There are a whole lot of kids wanting to be famous now, whereas if I'd even mentioned that word to one of my teachers, I would have got into a whole load of trouble.

The lyrics are what I work on the hardest, but I'm not trying to make a perfectly clear message or anything like that. In fact, I'm usually trying to avoid saying something too directly, because usually that rings false anyway.

You can't tell the story of a 13-year-old boy who knows every lyric to 'Phantom of the Opera' without also referencing how much teasing he gets at school.