I wanted to make music that spoke to me, without having the expectation of success that comes with Lady Antebellum.

The success of Watermark surprised me. I never thought of music as something commercial; it was something very personal to me.

I'm very creative - making music, making puppets, that's my thing - but mainstream success and the demands that brings? No, not really for me.

If you were to hold me to a standard of, 'What are you doing, singing about a scratch-off ticket at your level of success?' then my music's gonna be ridiculous.

The potential success that could come with signing with a major label didn't quite outweigh how important it was for me to make my music the way I knew it needed to be made.

Success happened little by little for me. I tasted the flavor of fame in small doses: I started at 10 years old when I won a music contest; I was performing at birthday parties, company meetings.

It's very easy for me to keep a low profile because the focus I feel is always on the music. Success and fame are two different things. And so I feel the success is always towards the music, which means that I can have a very normal and private lifestyle.

When I started to write music that was completely divorced from any sort of idea of commercial success, the real me started to come out. Normally, a musician in a session for a pop record would have to discard a lot of ideas because they won't fit, because they're not commercial.

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