And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.

Our children put down their guns when we did to imagine with us.
We imagined the shining link between the heart and the sun.
We imagined tables of food for everyone.
We imagined the songs.

I composed the text and my husband and children joined me, we sang,

By the late eighteenth century, there is a sad and permanent decline in the quality of music written for young performers or beginners: one has only to compare Bach's Album for Anna Magdalena Bach and the Two-Part Inventions with anything that came later. No composer of importance between Bach and Schumann turned his hand to writing for children, and Schumann's essays came after his years of greatest inspiration for piano writing had gone. (Mozart is the odd exception, but then he was, in fact, almost incapable of writing really easy pieces: he no doubt believed that his Sonata in D Major, K.576, was easy, perhaps because all the hard passages in the first movement were in simple two-part counterpoint, one voice in each hand, but he was wrong.)

Not only was I fiddling around at the keyboard but there were all these other children of all backgrounds wanting to play every sort of music bits of classical, jazz, pop, improvisation." The Guardian - 26/05/2000

I had with me a small battery-operated Sony system that I used to record thoughts and melodies, and I busied myself making a recording of the baby’s heartbeat, a low but significant rhythm being picked up by ultrasound. Maybe I’d write a song to the heartbeat one day. A creative thought designed to hold off my growing terror.

My whole family is really musical. My brother and my mom both write songs and my dad has always played the piano and ukulele. When we were little, my dad would make us mix tapes with songs by artists like the Beatles and Avril Lavigne, so we learned a lot from those. Even though I never really thought of being a singer, I’ve always loved it. I’ve been in the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus since I was about 8, which has helped my technique so much. It’s showed me all of the different types of classic music there are and how beautiful they can be. When I was 11 or 12, I started writing songs because it’s a good way to express your feelings. My brother is a really good songwriter so we’d give each other notes and write stuff together.

Sure, it's simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.

When I was about eight, my father started to compose new music for me, which I memorised and played until I was 15, when I started to compose music by myself.

I used to write drama for my learners and for children at church, and everyone would compliment me

It is the childlike part of us that produces works of the imagination. When we were children time passed so slow with us that we seemed to have time for everything.

I have a very young brother and sister, and if you can get a kid singing the words to a song after they heard it for the first time, it's a hit."

Out of my own great woe
I make my little songs.

It was fun kind of getting off the hamster wheel a little bit, I was able to write a bunch of songs, I started this kids' band called The Roughhousers and I wrote like 11 songs and we just put that out and it's fun. It's really good rock and roll music for kids and it's for adults too, because I just hate kids music. I would put kid music on and go, "Ugh, let's just put on Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton." I never played kid music for my kid, but this stuff is actually really good and we have the drummer from X and we have my ex-husband Murry Hammond was in the Old 97's playing bass and we have just an all-star super group of people doing the music and it's kind of taking off.