What first got me involved in politics was being 14, and a youth organizer comes to my house with a van full of 14 year old girls. “Hey, you want to go to the beach with us? But first we’re going to go support the cannery workers’ strike in Watsonville.”
I wanted to write a song about sexism, but I didn’t want to do it in a mechanical way and be like, “Don’t be sexist!” because that’s not how I talk in regular life.
In reality, I know I’m not hurt directly by sexism; however, my life is made less because of it, so I started thinking about the fallout from relationships in which people feed off each other.
Becoming a father made me a lot more sentimental than I ever was before. I never cried at movies before I became a parent. I feel music more intensely.
What I’m trying to do is make music that people relate to, that talks about ideas that are personal but also make that connection to trying to make revolutionary change, and I don’t need to change my music to get to a certain audience.
I have tried to write songs quickly that get scrapped. I’ve also taken a long time on songs that get scrapped because you can over-think something, and you’ve squeezed the life out of it. As opposed to work of art, it looks like a really great work of craftsmanship.
