I think it's important to have mystique.

I was in drama, wanted to be an actor.

The media says that equality for women has arrived, but if you look around, you still don't see girls playing guitars and having success with it.

A lot of the songs I've recorded are songs I write.

I've always got something to say.

Before I settled on music, I wanted to be an archaeologist, an astronaut, all sorts of really diverse things.

Girls see these defined roles they're supposed to follow in life, but when I was a young child, my parents told me I could be anything.

So now 20 years later people want us to get together so they can take shots at all these old babes trying to get back some youth. I mean come on; I've been there. I know what the press would do.

So it was out of necessity that Blackheart was born. I think it's great that now, 25 years later, we're not only putting out our own music, but are able to put out music by other bands. That's really exciting for us.

My parents taught me I could be anything in the world I wanted to be.

I sure saw a lot of kids that I'm sure didn't know a lot about us, or we were definitely new to them. The kids who came up to me afterward, we'd talk about music, sign a lot of autographs. So I'm sure we made a lot of new fans.

I love to engage with people who come to see us.

Def Leppard is obviously a different band that we are, but the music work well tighter. And the audiences seem work well together too. We are opening, but we're having a good time.

Blackheart Records being 25 years old represents staying power and the fact that we weren't able to get a record out through conventional means, so we had to create this record company to put out our records if we wanted to be a band that had records to give out to their fans.

I don't like to say where I'll be in 10 years.

You know, I have a really tough time finding new bands.

I've been doing this stuff for so long it's the one aspect of my life that I've paid attention to and really sort of not paid attention to the rest of it.

And you have a record company behind it, this is a key too, you need people to fight for your records, at least a little bit. So if you have a great song, it's catchy, and you've got a little bit of help, I think that's all you need. But there hasn't been that in music.

I don't know if I miss it per se, but I do miss the fact that there just doesn't seem to be any rock 'n' roll out there anyplace. Everything does seem kind of tame. It's even hard in Manhattan to go out and find a good band to go see.

I'm not a list person.

Why there aren't people out there willing to have fun playing rock 'n' roll. I just don't get it.

Partly, I like a bad reputation. But I also want a reputation of being a good person.

Obviously, some people are thick, and they're not gonna see what they don't want to see.

You want to have butterflies in your stomach, because if you don't, if you walk out onstage complacent, that's not a good thing.