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" Jazz has a lot to do with being very present. You know the structure, then you flow through it. "

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" I love singing all types of genres. "

" I'd been trained in choral, gospel, and a little bit of opera. "

" I am more prolific when I have something to respond to. I get my juice from people and real stories and things that seem common but are amazing. "

" Surrender is working with what happens. "

" I come from a family that has grown their own food from well into times of slavery, provided for themselves and people around them. So I found, through conversations about the earth and about the house with my neighbors, a lot of common ground. "

" I'm kind of a subtle person. "

" I've begun to realize, as I'm getting older, that I was taught to go for a certain kind of stillness to get things done. I missed that in my life. I loved my grandmother's property, out in South Georgia right above the Florida line, so I just thought I'd find some property where I could feel that again. "

" Making a record and being a touring artist is about cooperation between spirit, craft, emotion, and focus. "

" By high school, I was putting the music for the services together and teaching Sunday school to everybody's kids. "

" As a southern woman, we often define ourselves by who we are with. But I wanted my life to be built differently. "

" It's very hard for me to place myself alongside another artist. Everyone has something unique to express. "

" I'm so grateful for just the inherent mercy of life. "

" For me, I just want to sing about life. And since I come from a spiritual background, I turned to jazz, because I feel it's still sacred, like gospel. It's serious music, but it allows room to sing about so much other stuff as well. "

" I studied opera for a year at Georgia State University, but I wasn't interested in that meticulous, technical approach to music. So I left school and went back to jazz. "

" So many great singers we know have come from the church. "

" I call myself a singer-songwriter influenced by the gospel and jazz tradition. Naturally, because of my lifestyle and love for nature, there's a lot of folk and Americana there because that's just my life. "

" I get bored very quickly. "

" The whole musical institution of the church involves a lot of different styles of communication at the same time. Things like call and response. Sometimes they use the music to pray and work things out. And there's so much repetition in gospel, it's like churning butter. "

" Life is good. It might not go the way we plan it, but that's fine. We just do what we can. "

" I've always been genuinely interested in the spirit world. I've seen things I will never talk about because I'd be a fool to. You can't lay out that world in words. "

" Whoever is playing with me, they participate in the arrangement; I learned from Craig Street to really pool the stories and the skill and the voices of everybody around you on the bandstand to build an arrangement in the moment. "

" There's a lot of pressure that comes from the mainstream stuff, and already people who have been saying - people who don't know any better - have been saying things to me like, 'You should really think about neosoul. You'd definitely be more successful in that.' But that's not my expression. "

" The church is an institution of music and of production and performance, and it has to do with taking people to places inside of themselves and giving them an opportunity to sit deep in their own feelings, and to be together and deeply alone at the same time, and to process things. "

" I let the song guide me. I move through the space that I'm given rather than trying to make an impression on the material. I'm curious to learn from the music. "

" 'Salt' is like this snapshot in midair, an action shot. It's about my relationship with the church, the classical and choral music that I dealt with in school, and my new introduction to jazz. It's very hard for me to listen to from beginning to end, because I hear how lost I was. "

" I didn't wait around for my parents' opinion about my venture out into contemporary music. "

" There's a beautiful, kind of seductive trap in being autobiographical in our writing of songs: We just get stuck in our own syrup, and it's so personal that it almost can be embarrassing to the listener. "

" I'm a preacher's kid, I'm big-boned, I have giant feet, and I've always been able to run fast, and so I had this sense of, 'I can't fail. I'm invincible. I'm made of green juice and concrete; nothing's gonna happen to me.' "

" I've always loved the woods, and I've always loved gardening and a lot of solitude and quiet. "

" It's hard to know who you are until you're cracked open a little bit. "