Over the course of your career, you have talked about love in all of its different stages. What do you consider to be the biggest lesson you learned in the game of love?
Love yourself, honestly. Love is an animal, too. If you let it take control of you, you definitely won't have control. I say to everybody out there - find time for yourself. Even if you're in a relationship and it's beautiful and everything is going well, still find time for yourself. You got to make sure you don't give that person so much of you that you lose contact with yourself. Always love yourself.
I see. Well, you definitely took a different approach in selecting your album title, by flipping convention upside-down. Most artists typically self-title their work when they are releasing their debut album, but you flipped it and let your fifth bear your namesake. What special significance does this album have for you?
I didn't want any gimmicks. I could have made the album "When It Hurts" because that's the first single, but I didn't want to do that. I wanted to give the fans a sense of who I was in 2008. That is the whole nature of it all. That way, I don't have to try to gear everything around one song. I could just give everyone a fresh splash of me.
In the months leading up to the album's release, you toured in Iraq and performed for the troops. What led you abroad? How was the experience and the overall response?
Going over to Iraq was something I wanted to do. I got tired of looking at CNN and hearing "Yeah, we're over there fighting. Iraq is just crazy." I wanted to go over there and find out what was really going on. Going over there was a big experience for me because I found out that the troops are over there and they're doing the best that they can and trying to be peacemakers between wars that have been going on for 700 years. It's kind of hard to be a peacemaker when that's all they know.
They understand their role. Just being over there and doing a song like "Sailing" and performing and seeing their emotions come out on what they feel about life in general, they'd tell me, "I'm so happy you came over here because you gave us a sense that you guys really care." That was my goal – to just go over there and show them the love because they're doing a tremendous job over there for us.
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