What - of all the incredible duets that I've been able to sing, you know, John Raitt was still the one that I just shook in my boots just standing next to him. I loved him so much.
I think I'm a living embodiment of, 'Don't try to push me around or squash me,' whether its how I talk to a record label or in my relationships.
I made my first album, and I guess it wasn't a fluke, because now I'm on my 16th.
I like to think I get better with age, but maybe absence makes the heart grow fonder.
I tend to be freer on the piano. I never took guitar lessons, so my reach exceeds my grasp - what I hear in my head I don't always know how to play. But I love to play over something else. I'm not a self-starter. I get kind of bored with the same three folk chords that I know.
I have a really full life, both within music and outside it.
At 3 A.M., I'm still up watching videos of jazz heroes I never saw live. It's so thrilling. And not just the music. The Internet is changing the future of fund-raising. I'm thrilled by the potential.
Religion is for people who are scared to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there.
Not being a natural songwriter... for me the appreciation of a great song and the writers came early on, growing up in a musical family. My dad got to sing songs by some of the greatest writers of all time, Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Finding great songs is the hard part of my gig - it's not as hard as songwriting, that's much more daunting - but I love playing other people's music.
I think people must wonder how a white girl like me became a blues guitarist. The truth is, I never intended to do this for a living.
AC/DC's 'Highway to Hell' is the greatest meshing of vocal, guitar, and content I've ever heard. That's what I aspire to.
One of the biggest obstacles I've overcome in my life was thinking I didn't deserve to be successful. Artistically I'm not as much of a heavyweight as someone like Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell, because I'm not a creator of original music, and I worried about that for years.
In 1967 I entered Harvard as a freshman, confident - in the way that only 17-year-olds are - that I could change the world. My major was African Studies, and my plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism.
I'm honored when young people say they've gone to school on slide guitar with my records. But people get their influence from my live shows and records and YouTube, not me personally. I walk around with a hat on. People don't know it's me.
When you find a song that you love, you just have to do it - why would I try to match it? When I wrote more of the songs in the '90s - 'Nick of Time' and other songs I was surprised I came up with - it was because nobody else was saying what I wanted to say.
I think it's our job to write about what we're going through at the moment, and being 41, I'm not going to write about the same things I wrote about at 20. I don't think artists should be farmed out to pasture just because they're in rock n' roll.
I didn't have to be a pop singer with a certain look. When I started, there was really a revolution in natural artists with blues and folk artists crossing over; otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to get started.
The great thing about the arts, and especially popular music, is that it really does cut across genres and races and classes.
I grew up in Los Angeles in a Quaker family, and for me being Quaker was a political calling rather than a religious one.