The French Legion d’Honneur talks about growing out of her pants and how she definitely “ne regret rein”.

You were born in New Mexico and grew up in Texas. How did the singing thing start for you?

In our family we like to say I got my musicality from my mother and my lungpower from my dad [laughs]. My mother has a lot of natural music talent – she played the piano from the time she was four years old – and my father was a tall, strapping man with a barrel-chest. He was an oilman and he was also a baseball coach for little kids. So he was used to hollering out over oilfields and baseball fields, so they say I got my lungpower from him.

What about singing thing? Did you start in school choirs?

I did. From the time I was five I was in church choirs and then I was in school choirs all the time I was growing up, and I was also a very serious student of piano. My involvement in the school choir was also as an accompanist.

Did you have an opera moment? A moment where you suddenly thought ‘Wow, that kind of singing...