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" I don't know who my dad is. "

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" I learn something every time I go to work with a veteran. Every single time. "

" I've learned our soldiers are so much like everybody else. They're just put into an extreme situation. "

" When I finally got sober, I moved towards what I might have been if I hadn't been destroying myself when I was young. "

" I'm grateful to songwriting and recovery to bringing me to a place of peace. "

" I knew I had that Cajun heritage, that Acadian heritage; I just feel it. And my gut says Irish on the other side. Irish and French, that's what I feel. When you're young, it doesn't matter so much, but as you get older, I would suspect part of the ageing process is to wonder about your ancestors - who were they? What were their lives like? "

" I'm sort of stuck in adolescence in many ways, like most artists, and march to my own beat. "

" I think we're very much in a mystery here in this life and that artists try to pierce the mystery with their art. "

" I try not to eat cakes, but sugar screams my name. "

" I'm a big fan of Lou Reed, and I do a lot of talking through songs. It's more effective with my vocal limitations and also more powerful to slightly sing sometimes. It depends on the emotion, but I'm never going to try to compete with great singers. "

" There's an ocean of misunderstanding. It's called the civilian-military divide. I had a lot to learn about our military - who they are, what burdens they carry. "

Misunderstanding

" People in Ireland take in the whole song. After a long history of great singers and songwriters and poets, they are able to consume the entire song - not just the external; they go inside. "

" I spent my 18th birthday in jail. Charges were dropped as long as I promised never to return to the state of Kansas. My parents took me home to Louisiana. I lasted there a week. Then I ran away. "

" I'm openly gay, and I've got a major label record deal in Nashville, and it happened when I was 42 years old. It's not supposed to happen that way. "

" There's such a thing as a tribe - and family of choice. "

" I don't play everything I write. I mean, everything I write is not that good. I bring out into the world the ones I think that are really worthy of an audience's attention. "

" The job of the artist is to go to the places where most other people are embarrassed to go to. And show it. "

" Songs, especially lyrics, have always been really important to me. "

" As a songwriter, I was always mining my own depths, which were filled with confusion and darkness. "

" Songs are here to help us: they build bridges from heart to heart. "

" There's a lot of vulnerability in songs - I'm not talking about pop songs - from people that are in the art of songwriting more than the commercial enterprise of it. "

" In my early years, I couldn't find a community. I couldn't find anybody like me. I felt so isolated. There was nothing but shame and loneliness. "

" I write to make some sense of things that confuse me. The mechanics of my own heart are the most confusing I know about - and don't know about - and other people's are a bit confusing, too. "

" I think each veteran's soul has something that it needs to say. I know from my own personal traumas, it's very hard to know what that is. But when I'm watching someone else struggle, it's not as confusing for me, 'cause it's not my struggle, so I can help identify that. "

" Art, when done well, creates empathy. "

" I think music is the highest form of healing. "

" War is hell. Sending young people to conflicts that are unwinnable and unresolvable - it puts them in a position where they're going to suffer. And yet their experience is that they're proud of their service, and they should be. Service freely rendered is a noble thing. "

" If I write for beauty and truth, the songs will find their way to me. Then, it's the songs that speak to the audience, and they can become part of the tribe that is into what I do. "

" My experience is that the universal is the personal. If you can get past your navel-gazing into the deepest part of yourself as a writer, you find everyone - we're all there. "

" If somebody in a family is in service, the whole family is in service. I didn't know that. I didn't know our veterans were being deployed seven, eight, nine, 10 times. It's inhumane. "

" I think having near-death experiences, they sure made me free. "