Crystal Bowersox

'American Idol' is the fast track to fame. I'm just lucky it worked out. I don't feel different. The way people react to me is different.

The only 'Idol' music I've ever purchased is Phillip Phillips.

It's not a natural process, 'American Idol,' but it does great things for the people that are on that show. If you don't walk away from it with some kind of positive outlook or find an opportunity to come from it, then I feel like that's a choice.

I really - I try not to look ahead too far into the future and really just appreciate the here and now.

This sounds really cheesy and weird, but the pitbull is a sweet animal that just wants love until it's provoked - that's kind of how I've lived my life, too.

If I have a name out there from this thing called 'American Idol,' I don't understand why anyone wouldn't use it for good. That's the way the world should work.

I've been bisexual for as long as I can remember. I remember being made fun of in junior high for that. It was something that was shameful, and it really shouldn't be.

I did pretty well busking. I would play two to eight hours a day, and I could make two or three hundred an hour.

I went to a public school in Oak Harbor, Ohio, and it's a very rural community. I was an artist kid, and I just didn't fit in very well.

I enjoy having my privacy and not seeing my face on the cover of everything, y'know?

It's not my concern to make a commercial pop record. I want to make a record of music that I would listen to, that is lyrically rich and has songs that people can relate to - more along the Jakob Dylan route: people who create for the art of it and not necessarily the monetary rewards of it.

Everything is pre-taped these days, but I'm a believer in, 'If you can't do it live, don't do it.'

You have to learn to draw the same emotion you had when you wrote a song every time you perform it. Acting is the same way: You have to find those emotions and bring them to the surface, and then put them back when you're done.

Acting isn't necessarily pretending. It's storytelling. It's giving someone your perspective on something.

Acting was my first love before music.

I've known who I am as an artist for a long time; 'Idol' has shown me what I'm capable of. I know it's all possible for me now. I can go in any direction I want. I'm forever grateful to them.

I have a lot of love and respect for Melissa Etheridge. I love Joe Cocker, Ray LaMontagne, Feist.

My music is pretty versatile; I have a lot of genres and styles. I don't think I should be pigeonholed into one thing. So we'll see where my career goes.

I know that, as a bisexual, sometimes people who are gay or lesbian look down upon the bisexual community as well and assume that people who are bisexual just don't know what they want or are just playing both sides of the fence, and that's not the case, either.

I don't think anyone's sexuality needs to be a public issue other than to give others the confidence to love themselves wholeheartedly and to be their true, authentic self without any shame.