“This came from a conversation. Lee Dagger of Bimbo Jones [the production team of Dagger and Marc Jacobs – Ed] flew over from London and he just literally said, you know, I feel like I’m doing everything now, I’m marketing myself, I’m doing this. I said, Yeah, I am working everything that I’ve got to try to make a dollar. And when I said that, it was like, Wow, if we’re feeling this, probably everybody on the planet is feeling this way. We need to write a song about this.”Kristine W (256)

“That was something that happened to me, but it translated nicely. I wrote it in a way that you can put a different story to it. You could say one more try with a relationship, one more try with somebody passing away and they’re not there, or your youth, you want to go back, “Time has been my teacher, I don’t want to leave you.” Those are the songs that I really am most proud of – the ones that people can do their own interpretation and apply to them. For me that was me going back to the Tri-Cities [Washington State – Ed] after I went to Las Vegas and was gone for a couple of years. It was so hard trying to go to school and make a living as a live performer there, and after two years of being away, my grandparents looked older, so many things had changed, all the people that I went to high school with, many of them were gone, they weren’t there anymore, their parents didn’t even live in those houses. So many things changed in my hometown that it was like, Wow. And it just hit me like that. “Every window in my hometown is empty and I really don’t know why. And the house you used to live in is cold and falling down.” My best friend that I grew up with next door, she didn’t live there anymore and there were people I didn’t know, the house was really rundown in a matter of a few years. So that took that connotation, my best friend and me and my hometown. But other people applied it more to relationships or somebody passing away. So it was very rewarding to see how it moved other people in different directions.”Kristine W (256)

“”Feel What You Want” is my stepfather had died and I really was depressed over his sudden death. He was my mentor, really, and one of my heroes. And he died of an aneurysm really suddenly. So that was really feeling his loss. That song just made me think about everything from religion to pollution to the planet. I wove a lot of things that I was feeling into that song. “Sun rises at 9, it departs at 5 again, ain’t doing overtime no more. In this world of color the brightest pictures are plugged right into your wall,” in television, you know, it just seemed like everything on the news was depressing. So when you’re depressed it even seems more depressing. I felt like I was numb from the death and I was not living anymore. I was just kind of existing.”Kristine W (256)

“I think that song has kind of morphed, too, because I added that new section: “don’t text me, don’t tell me, I’ve got to get up, I’ve got to get up.” Because I get up, I go out, I work hard. You know, when I wrote that song originally, whatever, 13 years ago, the Internet was not everything. We were getting up, going to work, now we’re barraged with even more. You find out somebody’s dead like two seconds after they die. It’s made reality just in your face, and everything’s instant. So I thought that song is more powerful now, because it’s even more relevant now with the economy being so bad, and “there’s a man and every day I see him on the street and he’s asking for change and he looks my age.” It’s more relevant now than it ever was. That story was probably not really listened to then because it wasn’t as in your face, the economy wasn’t as harsh and beaten down as it is right now. So I just thought, I’m going to take that song [“Don’t Wanna Think” – Ed] I’m going to add to it, and I’m going to reframe it. And I’m really proud of how it turned out [“I Get Up” – Ed].”Kristine W (256)

“That was watching my grandmother in the nursing home. She was dying, and I had a baby. My grandma was fading out and I had this newborn baby. It was just such a circle of life moment. Like a tiny fragile flower. She’d nurtured me and now I have this new life I have to nurture.”Kristine W (256)

“It’s a song of hope, really: “I can see you coming, for so long you’ve been running. Wish I could save you just one time, but I’m feeling that my last words have come and gone.” Those words Eran Tabib and I wrote together and we were writing them about two completely different things. Eran Tabib from Spin Doctors, he’s a great songwriter. I came to his house, and he was freaking out because they were being bombed in Israel. The Palestinians were bombing Tel Aviv and he’s freaking out because he hasn’t talked to his family in three days. He’s just sitting on the floor totally bummed out, and I was totally bummed out because I had a friend that was dying of AIDS, and there was no coming back – he had passed the point of being able to survive. So we came together on that, we were both in a very dark place. That verse meant something different to him than it did to me, but we did it together.”Kristine W (256)