“I guess you can say I ‘do the Twist.’ I like playful dance moves that aren’t too serious.”

I think your ego gets in the way of making something good because it kind of blinds you from the actual art.

Whenever someone says they like something about my music.

A lot of musicians talk about how they were into music from the start; they always wanted to be musicians. It wasn’t like that for me. I didn’t think of it as a job or a career – it was just something that was constant.

When you’re an adult, things mellow out. I think when you’re a teenager and you are sad and the world is ending, everything is about that one sadness.

Sometimes when I perform, and it’s obvious the audience is just there to party, or if I feel a wall between me and the audience, I get existential about it.

In my first few years of being in New York, I had a major identity crisis because I’d never stayed in one place for so long.

I’ve been very careful to always make clear that I am a real person. That’s why I’m on social media a lot.

There’s this myth that women are supposed to compete with each other or something, or we’re supposed to hate each other, and that’s totally not productive.

My father was obsessed with folk music from around the world, and I think the countless artists who performed them are my biggest influences.

I think the pressure gets to me when I play shows and there’s more people in the audience than I’m used to.

Tour isn’t good for writing, but it’s good for inspiration.

I think it’s our responsibility as artists to not only fight for our art but fight for the communities that are the reason we’re able to continue making art, especially since, in Brooklyn’s case, we as artists somehow made it ‘cool’ enough for the bigger money-making industries to start taking over.

People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.

What’s important to me is that my songs can exist without any material anything. It’s very reflective of my ideology.

I tend to kind of try to use what’s in my environment to the best of my ability rather than seek out things that I don’t already have.

I always have strong urges to sabotage myself.

I go to cancer wards, and I tell them guys, ‘I’ve beaten it. You can, too.’

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can.

Don’t say you can do something when you really can’t.

You’ve done it before and you can do it now. See the positive possibilities. Redirect the substantial energy of your frustration and turn it into positive, effective, unstoppable determination.

My shows are not all-the-way filthy, but they can be.

We give advice, but we cannot give the wisdom to profit by it.

Now God be thanked that the name of a hill is such music, that the name of a river can heal.