“When you are a minority, it’s your job to bend, and when you love someone, you really want to make it work.”

I’m not an innovator.

I wanted to take up guitar because playing piano is a little harder. Carrying a keyboard around is harder, and finding a real piano is much harder, and I wanted to play live more, so I figured a guitar would be easier to carry around.

I don’t really listen to pop-country, but I like really, really old country that’s closer to folk. Like Johnny Cash, who is considered country.

I really just care about making music and how I can make it next.

On one hand, I think it’s very important to talk about race and talk about gender, because if it’s not talked about, then we won’t progress.

You always want what you can’t have, and that all-American thing, from the day I was born,

I can’t read in a car, because I’ll get sick. It’s almost instant.

Oftentimes, the most important decisions I make are the ones I don’t put much thought into.

If I ever found a place where I belonged, that in itself would be an identity crisis to me.

I lived abroad most of my life in insular international communities.

I don’t set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it’s about.

I think what’s hard for me is not that I don’t get downtime to chill, it’s that I don’t get time to make music.

As a woman of color, I always have to be at 150 percent and better than everybody in the room to be considered competent.

You can be heartbroken about a relationship but also, from it, realize you are you, and you’re okay with who you are or where you came from.

When someone is a musician – trying to make a living off being a public figure – it’s really easy for people to see me as a face on a screen that doesn’t have a personal life.

Often I’ve had problems automatically bending to a lover’s will, becoming what I know they want me to be. Immediately, I learn all the music they love, listen to it, study it, instead of being like, ‘This is what I love!’

“It’s not where you got it from, it’s where you take it.” To me, that’s just an integral part of why I even bother making music.

All to often, however, what she [the woman] does want is the man she hopes she will make out of the man she already has.

Let’s not make that mistake again.

I think it’s more about trying to just focus exclusively on writing music and making that a viable, sustainable lifestyle.

If you’re going to make a film, you have to try to make sure it comes out of a childlike passion, as if you’re doing it for the first time.

Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.

Larry David finds a way to make jokes about the Holocaust. It would never have occurred to me. And it was funny.

You want to attack somebody? Make fun of them.