When I was 12 years old and first decided I wanted to be a songwriter, the people that I always looked up to were Rodgers and Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, and people like that.
I'm a Mexican girl from California, and I never grew up thinking I could be in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. I didn't really see myself in that. Not that I didn't grow up loving Rodgers and Hammerstein, but I don't know - I just never put myself there.
Rodgers and Hammerstein didn't mean anything to me. I just wanted to have a hit, I just wanted to be like those people on the radio. It was all of a case of the present tense with no projecting into the future, particularly.
I didn't really want to write just lyrics, but I wanted to meet Leonard Bernstein. Music was always the first reason I was writing songs.
I grew up in a little town with about 6,000 or 7,000 people. I always knew from 11 or 12 years old that I wanted to be a writer, and I always wanted to write about growing up in a place like that that's small and you don't fit into.
I feel very fortunate to have been associated with people such as Rodgers and Hammerstein. I think they were geniuses of their time.
I've never met a Mormon I didn't like. They're really nice people. They're so Disney. They're so Rodgers and Hammerstein.
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.
My grandmother had always played show tunes from classic musicals at the piano when we were growing up, so that helped me fall in love with Rodgers and Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Lerner and Loewe, etc.
It may sound amazing to people today, but Rodgers and Hammerstein were considered by - how can I put it? - the sort of opinion-making tastemakers and everything to be 'off the scale as sentimental.'
The greatness of America is that it produces exuberant geniuses like Louis Armstrong and Fred Astaire and Leonard Bernstein. We are meant to be a jazzy people who talk big and jump on the table and dance; we aren't supposed to be dopey and glum and brood over old injuries.
I started as a songwriter and wanted to be like Leonard Cohen. I've always seen my stories as enlarged songs.
As a 12-year-old when I won my first gold in Athens, I wanted people to know what the Paralympic games were.
I always wanted to be a writer since I was around 12 years old and I wrote my first book.
I came here from Romania when I was 12 years old. I had an accent. High school was tough a little bit for a few years. I wanted to fit in. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be good-looking. I wanted to be popular. I spent a lot of time thinking, 'What are these people going to think of me?'
I'd lost my family to my years of failing as a songwriter. All I had were bills, child support, and grief. And I was about to get fired. It looked like I'd trashed my act. But there was something liberating about it. By not having to live up to people's expectations, I was somehow free.
I built a reputation as a songwriter in the industry before my own hits. People were used to coming to me for songs. There were songs like 'Clown' and 'Mountains' that were my songs that I wanted to keep. But the record labels saw me as a songwriter. It was hard to get people to believe in me as an artist.