“I don’t care about making anything new. I make music to express an emotion, and if the emotion is nostalgic, so be it.”

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!’

I try to be regimented and try to stay healthy and work out and eat properly and go to sleep. And not get too caught up in the industry in my regular life, so I can save all my expression and energy for my art.

I think people don’t realize how little of being an artist is making art.

I took a few piano lessons as a kid, but it didn’t last; I just learned piano from doing it over and over on my own, because I didn’t have many friends, and there was always a keyboard in the house.

Pop artists work really hard, and they might not work for the same things that indie artists do, but they’re still musicians, and they’re still making art.

I didn’t fit in anywhere when I grew up, but I was always American, so to survive,

I’d always been fascinated by death, which sounds so morbid. Especially being a woman trying to make music, I think there’s a sense that you’re never young enough, or your career is going to end soon.

The whole ‘grunge-girl’ comparisons certainly are the easiest to pick out, and I appreciate that music journalists are rushed.

With solo shows, you have complete control over the set list. If you feel like you want to do something different or do a new song, you can just work it in. You can talk to the audience or not talk to the audience. There’s nothing that’s set.

When you’re young is the one time when you get to indulge in being morose and take yourself most seriously.

I’m looking for something that gives me a chance to stretch. Because I have my own work, and I can do anything I want in my own work – juggle, tap dance, anything I want.

As far as we’re concerned, there was no sporting organisation [that] should have anything to do with the sport in South Africa.

What I do is make myself this over-the-top character that people either find endearing or they think is a joke. Then I can do anything I want.

I was never geeky about anything.

It’s hard to be an artist. It’s hard to be anything. It’s hard to be.

If I don’t feel right about what I’m in, I don’t feel right about anything.

So I never thought of anything as making fun of it, but kind of reveling in the melodrama of it. It’s a melodrama.

But anything that you hear about Japan is nothing like what you see when you actually go over there and see it, you know, in a real situation.