“I feel like I’ve always wanted to live in one place and stay in one place, but I always end up choosing things that make me travel.”

You can never learn enough about music.

I couldn’t wait to get out of school, but once I did, I didn’t actually know what I wanted to do with myself. I don’t really know how it happened, but I just started writing music and realized that’s what I wanted to do.

I really like The Cars. They’re just so over the top and super pop, but I don’t feel guilty. I’m proud of all the music I listen to.

I was one of those girls people called ‘intense.’

I don’t think I’m alone in this: I’m obsessed with trying to not only be happy but maintain happiness, but my definition of happiness is skewed more towards ecstasy rather than contentment.

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

It would actually feel forced or unnatural to try to do a different singing style or to try to change my sound completely.

I was a film major because, for some reason, I thought that that was a creative job that had more job opportunities. I don’t know what logic I was following, but that was my impression at the time.

I don’t want to be elitist.

I think it’s very dangerous as an artist to be comfortable.

Maybe this is a made-up belief to preserve myself, but I do believe that everyone has a purpose, and my purpose is to put out music that means something.

When I go onstage and am performing the way I want to… I finally feel like myself.

What I have a problem with is when it becomes another form of tokenization, of shrinking me into a symbol instead of a multilayered, female Asian artist.

I don’t want to be a musician’s musician. I want to be an everyone’s musician.

I understand that, because there are so many musicians, you have to make artists into brands, but I sometimes feel like I have to be some kind of non-human icon in order for people to listen to my music.

Being an outsider at all times is both unhealthy and useful, because you become much more objective about things.

If I don’t cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it’s failed.

I feel like what I have become is halfway between my mother and my father, violent and impulsive and desperate and afraid. I feel like I have lost control of what I have become.

I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.

It’s hard to enjoy practical jokes when your whole life feels like one.

I try to make music with emotion and integrity. And authenticity.

I do feel that I have to use my voice for those that don’t have one. I have to do the best I can in my own work to represent my culture, represent the women of my country, of Latin America. What we stand for. What we’re made of.

Since I have spread my wings to purpose high, The more beneath my feet the clouds I see, The more I give the winds my pinions free, Spurning the earth and soaring to the sky.

Narrative- and image-making creatures like humans don’t feel any experience is complete unless it’s recorded.