When we started making 'Where You Live', I bought a bunch of Polaroid cameras in so that people could record the experience. Some of those pictures are in the CD sleeve.

I meet people in my daily life, people who seem to experience some change and some growth on a personal level, and that gives me hope.

I grew up with music in the house. I was told I could sing as soon as I started talking. Everybody in my family sang, always lots of records, blues and jazz and soul, R&B, you know, like Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Coltrane, that kind of thing.

Everyone is looking for connections between the songs. I don't usually approach a record as a concept. There's no overriding theme I'm trying to represent. It's all about the individual songs.

My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it.

People's real hopes and dreams can be distorted and misdirected and packaged until you're not sure what you really want or what you even really need.