Beth Hart

“I don't think that Americans are ungrateful, not at all. But I do think that we are a young country, and we have a lot to learn.”

“I love being an American, and it's a beautiful country, but we are a bunch of whack jobs. We have got so much to learn.”

“I like swimming or go to the gym, but I am alone a lot, and that can get a little depressing.”

“There is something about live albums that I enjoy so much more than studio albums from all of my favorite artists. When I am listening to them live, I get to connect so much more to their truth than in studio albums.”

“Once I finish something, if I don't feel that it's absolutely fabulous, there's no way I would ever let it be recorded, I wouldn't even present it to a producer.”

“It's really hard to do, but I think it's an important thing for, no matter what type of artist you are, to trust that the reason why you are given the love of being artistic is just to make you happy - it's not to make you rich and famous.”

“I had so much anger and judgement towards myself for my work not being up to the standard that I expected it to be, so I wouldn't allow myself to complete anything.”

“Meditation is really good. I do that a lot with my bass player Bob, and we do TM: transcendental meditation.”

“I really love Dinah Washington and anything live from her - she had some of the greatest jazz musicians in the whole world, and sometimes she would be with a big band, and sometimes she'd just be on stage with a muted trumpet, upright bass, and a piano.”

“I always try and be as positive as I can and give people the benefit of the doubt because, in my own experience - seeing myself fall so hard so many times in my life and do so many things where I lost my way so many times - and then people didn't give up on me, like my husband and my family.”

“I've been in therapy since I was five, but music goes way, way, way, way, way beyond therapy.”

“I wrote my first song when I was four, and I played it at my piano recital.”

“To me, I don't care if I co-write or if I write alone. If it's a great song and it makes it to the record, then that's what is supposed to come, you know what I mean.”

“When I'm going through something really difficult, I think it's what made me go to the piano for the first time when I was a child. I look at it as a place to pray.”

“When you love the music that you're going to play, of course you're going to do your best.”

“If you're going to go the way of 'American Idol,' then you better be able to do what you want musically, because just going for the fame will only keep you happy for so long.”

“I tend to have a lot of songs ready for each record I do anyway. I always have. I was thinking, the more you write, the better chance you're going to come up with a collection of stuff that is going to work together.”

“Sometimes when people ask a lot of me, or they're not liking what I'm turning in, especially when I'm working one on one with someone, I can get really insecure.”

“I love getting to have different food and getting to be around different people and different cultures and different ways people look at life. It's really kind of helped me open up my mind and see the world from different perspectives.”

“As a kid, I hated home, and I just wanted so much to learn or do something that could take me away and keep me away forever. And then I got blessed to get to make music and meet people who wanted to work with me. And then, the next thing I knew, I was on the road, and I was gone.”