There's a mourning period after the death of a character. Mine was like three months. It was intense, because you just start to love this person. And Angela is an interesting character because she's easily misunderstood. People love her, people hate her, people don't get her. She's one of the emotional centers of Boardwalk Empire (2010). It's like a death.

I was one of the only people who didn't go to college from my high school. I didn't even apply. You already feel like you have the odds stacked against you when you make decisions that aren't popular.

I started playing guitar when I was nine and I started writing songs right away. I spent pretty much every day playing and writing, but I always thought it was just something I did for myself. I love great music and I really hate mediocre music. If I wasn't any good or if the songs weren't worth it, then I wasn't going to try and do anything with them. It took me 10 years of songwriting to get to a place where I thought "Maybe this is worth sharing." Especially working with Devon, once its not just yours, I think you can kind of see it a little bit better and maybe get a little more courage to put it out there.

The things that happen along the way always change your options when you're an actor. I always aim to work on things that seem genuinely interesting to me. I was definitely limited in my choices before Boardwalk Empire (2010) came along. That show changed the quality of my options. I had done a lot of independent films for years, but I was still stuck in this weird limbo where you feel like you're clearly part of the business, but you can't move up - it's a holding pattern.

When I was younger, the huge guiding force of what not to do was how embarrassing something might be for me. As an adult, and especially as a woman, you're more in tune with the things you want said or represented through your work. I'm always on the lookout for roles that are written for a man that I can play as a woman.

There's still not a lot of roles for women being represented in the media. The majority of the work I've done has been written or directed by men. So being a woman, it's definitely nice to create your own picture of what it is to be a woman, it's not what a man thinks it is.

[on Manny & Lo (1996)] Lisa Krueger really did that movie the way she wanted to do that movie. There were so many opportunities for her to basically sell it out and get stars attached and all these things, but she really had a vision for it and wanted to make it her film.

It's all a process of layering, right as you hear it. The more you add to it, the more it tells you a story. Sometimes we have certain ideas about a song. Sometimes that will get in the way. The song will go where it wants to go.