But unfortunately, in my unrelenting drive to get back on that drum stool, the major casualty in all of it was that I really forgot about me.
When I played in the sandbox, the cat kept covering me up.
People who want to remember me as Cat Stevens - welcome. Those who want me as Yusuf, you're here.
Cat Stevens' music, voice, and energy made me feel so secure. He sounded different from some of the paternal figures in my life, so gentle and kind.
I was raised on songs of poetry like Simon and Garfunkel and Cat Stevens and Neil Young, etc. I love those old songs probably the most because they hit me so deep down in my core.
'I Will Not Be Broken' has really become very healing for me. Any time you go through a cataclysmic event... it's going to inform the richness that you sing from... The experiences of life make all your emotions, I think, deeper.
I had this unusual mix of curiosity, the ability to write in ways people understood, and when I appeared, viewers seemed to trust me to get them through some cataclysmic changes.
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
When I'm on stage, the songs that we've chosen to play from the back catalog are things that still resonate with me, and matter to me. And the songs that I couldn't be a part of, we don't play anymore.
I've had agents tell me, 'You're not gonna be on the cover of anything; you're a catalog girl.' I've had clients tell me, 'You're too fat, and we can't book you any more because you don't fit into the jeans.'
Living in Georgia, I never wanted to model. But I had the travel bug big time when I was young. I think because I had an all-American look, I was great for catalogs. They constantly sent me overseas for editorial, but I would always come back with catalog jobs. I was fine with that. It served my purpose to see the world.
'Sherlock' fans are, by and large, an intelligent breed, so they've gone through my back catalogue and got what I've done, why and how I've done it. There is some obsessive behaviour, but I worry for them rather than me.
Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.
I get that racism exists, but it's not a catalyst for my content. I don't need to talk about race to have material. My style of comedy is more self-deprecating. I think that makes me more relatable. When you deal with 'topics' - race, white versus black - you're not separating from the pack. You're doing what everybody else is doing.
If it wasn't for Kenny Rogers, I don't think I would be in country music. He was that guy when I was a kid - his music and 'Hee Haw' made me perk my ears up and made me say, 'What is this? I want to hear more of that.' He was that catalyst for me to start this whole run in country music.
In 1906, just as we were definitely giving up the old shed laboratory where we had been so happy, there came the dreadful catastrophe which took my husband away from me and left me alone to bring up our children and, at the same time, to continue our work of research.
What you see with me is what you get. I don't have to conduct a poll to figure out what I'm going to tell somebody. I don't have to hire some consultant to come up with some cute catch phrase. I just call it like I see it.
Drag is great way to get people to pay attention to me, but it's a difficult way to get people to take me seriously as a musician. So it's a weird Catch-22. It's like a gimmick that gets them to pay attention, but when they see my image, they're like, 'There's no way this is going to have any legitimacy to it.'
It's kind of a catch-22 now because since the 'Da Vinci Code,' I have access to places and people that I didn't have access to before, so that's a lot of fun for somebody like me, but I'm always trying to keep a secret. I don't want people to know what I'm writing about.
'Catch-22' was a nightmare to make, and everybody was unhappy except me.
