“Suffering for your art is most definitely overrated but I do get a certain, I don’t know, satisfaction from being able to deal with my paranoia and insecurity.”

Most of the lyrics are over a year old, and it doesn’t feel like it’s about me. Time created a distance.

I am a very sensitive person, very impulsive and emotional.

I try to imagine how we would live if we didn’t know we were going to die. Would we live our lives differently? Less careful, maybe? Less scared? These are beautiful things to think about and build a song around.

There’s not only emotion in the way you sing but also in what you sing. That way I can compensate it.

The music comes first. When Geoff has made something the inspiration comes automatically. His music is very expressive. But still is is a very difficult process: I have to add something to his music, not push it away. It has to be equal, and I find that very difficult.

The blackness of darkness, forever.

I’ve had a wordless phase, and that’s still not entirely over: what I sing is not always literally meant that way, and you can hear that in the way it is sung.

I think that after a year of Portishead I’ve become a little more sober.

A lot of people question my image and why I do what I do, and the answer is because this is how I want to present myself.

I’ve just put my heart and soul in a song and need at least a week to recover.

My voice adapts itself to the music. I can do a lot more than you hear in Portishead.

I thought I had a clear picture of death, but now I know it’s a mystery and it will always be a mystery, although it is something we all have in common: everybody knows that life ends with death.

I’m not vain, I’m insecure.

We need to make peace with who we are so insecurities don’t become a distraction to how we live. Just because I sometimes feel insecure doesn’t mean I have to be insecure.

I am insecure. If you ask me, everybody is.

When Christ becomes our central focus, contentment replaces our anxiety as well as our fears and insecurities.

I’m insecure about everything, because I’m never going to look in the mirror and see this blond, blue-eyed girl. That is my idea of what I’d like to look like.

All I wanted was to break your walls, all you wanted was to break me

I’ve spent a lot of time holding onto things and people that brought me misery because I was afraid of the void that may be there once I let go. I know now my voids were just as illusionary as the fear and insecurities that created them.

When I first started writing the album, “Cry Baby” was a song that I really wanted to write because it represented all of these personal insecurities that I had for a long time.