With the Constitution they set something in motion that is a pretty extraordinary document and a recipe for the way you would want people to live.

Pretty much all I say politically is I encourage people to register to vote.

I`m very influenced by landscapes, not so much the way places look as the way the names sound. In this country we`ve got so many cultures, and the place names - the Spanish names and the Indian names, which are so incredibly musical.

As citizens we have to be more thoughtful and more educated and more informed. I turn on the TV and I see these grown people screaming at each other, and I think, well, if we don`t get our civility back, we`re in trouble.

I like to think about stringing songs together like a string of pearls, or a string of beads, but ultimately it has to be stuff that really works with the band, and gives a spin to the older material.

To me acting and singing are worlds apart.

I don`t ever worry about whether I`m being true to my country roots. My country roots were adopted. I never worry about what I can do and what I should do. I just do what I want to do.

On the male-dominated 1970s music industry`s attitude toward women: "ladies were regarded as a liability: the view was, they get pregnant and they freak out on the road, they`re unreliable and they don`t sell."

On growing up an Air Force brat: "We weren`t part of a real community. There were people from all over, which meant there was no culture."

I loved Johnny Cash, but the folk revival happened when I was 15. There was an electricity about it, something romantic about those ballads, whereas country music sounded boring. You have to grow up, start paying the rent and have your heart broken before you understand country. As a teenager I became obsessed with Bob Dylan. And Joan Baez! I mean, what girl back then didn`t want to be her?

On studying acting on a university drama scholarship: "When I was singing, it felt so real. Whereas when I was acting, I was just acting."

On touring with Gram Parsons: "Gram was always fine when we were singing together. That was one thing I could do for him. It was when I wasn`t around that he seemed to get into trouble."

[The next two years were] a very black period". [Her daughter, Hallie, was being looked after most of the time by her parents.] "I didn`t have any money. I had a sense of terrible loss. But what I also had was a fire in my belly. I wasn`t going to go back to waiting table. I felt I had to be better at fronting a band.

[What she loves about singing country is] "its restraint, which intensifies the emotion in the music".

"[I`m] an excellent ex-wife [with] a wonderful relationship with my two husbands. Paul [Kennerly] and Brian [Brian Ahern] are probably my two best friends".

On her one-sided conversations with her pets: "If I`m crazy, I`m blissfully so!"

Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it`s a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.