I've always thought of myself as a strong person. However, it's taken me a while to fully find my voice.

I always defined myself in terms of my talkativeness, and being without a voice hits me in a number of ways.

My first album was me finding myself and my voice, finding how I sing. I was rolling with the punches because everything was new to me.

You can't be a sexy person unless you have something sexy to offer. With me, it's my voice: the way that I sing, the way I express myself when I sing.

I'm developing more stuff in my voice, more Nick Swardson. It's me as myself in a sense and kind of in my voice, no accent no affectation. I'm growing into my own persona.

Rock and roll kind of screwed up my voice poetically. I found myself having this 'Beat' voice in my poems. It was like this self-fulfilled prophecy because everybody was calling me this rock poet, this Beat poet.

I used to be really scared to voice my opinion, whether it was with the other girls or just about an outfit I didn't like. I kept worrying what other people would think of me if they didn't agree. But I learned that I was just hurting myself.

They sent me the script, asking me to play the part of a general. I have never played the part of an authority figure. I've never thought of myself that way. I was uncomfortable with it, but I worked at it and knew I had a guttural voice for a general.

I don't have a writer's room. I write all the shows myself. Ninety-one episodes a season, I'm sitting there at the computer writing and writing and writing because I want the voice to be authentic so that the audience is hearing from me and not other writers.

I'd faced a lot of rejection from labels and the industry, and it was getting hard to keep believing in myself. But something wouldn't let me - inside - I had this voice that was relentlessly hopeful, and honestly, I just loved performing and writing too much to ever really quit.

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