Quotes

I think performance art comes from a simple place of wanting to express things beyond just sound.

I have never in my career embarked on a journey towards controversy. I have never deliberately set a flame.

I get so many ideas for songs, but I'm so seldom disciplined enough to sit down and crank them out.

The world needs actual excitement and emotion more than it needs cool people.

I hate being ignored.

Crowdfunding as an idea itself isn't new--bands have been doing it since the dawn of time.

My number-one goal is to never feel like I'm strictly defining myself. The minute I feel like I'm doing that as anything--as theatrical, as feminist, as songwriter--I feel like the minute I name it, I'm stuck in a box.

I think I've been addicted to openness since long before my rock career. I was terrible as a teenager. I used to go out of my way to make people uncomfortable with personal details. I was always fascinated by the idea that we have these weird, random boundaries between what we do and don't show.

Bands like Nirvana had theatrical sensibilities, playing with image, challenging assumptions people were making about them, the apex being Kurt Cobain in a dress to make a point.

I was just a very dark kid. My family was complicated.

I suppose I'm happy to sell my time and energy, but I'm not happy to sell my initial creative time.

I had very literal parents and I wanted to survive with metaphor and art, and there was a real sense of shame around it.

I draw the line at letting people into my songwriting cave. To me, that's where the alchemy happens and where the mystery is.

I don't feel at home in New Orleans. I don't feel at home in Austin or L.A. And I just felt immediately at home in northern Australia.

Every album is just a greatest hits of whatever songs are on a pile when I go in to make a record.

If you're willing to take risks, Twitter is a vast amusement park of interesting life possibilities.

If you want the world to pay for projects, you have to be able to display why you're worthy.

I've always been a creative workaholic. I have never had a period of my life where I didn't have at least half a dozen projects going on at once.

I'm a massive fan of David Lynch and Twin Peaks (1990).

I think to say that meditation is helpful to artists is true and it's great, but it's also essentially helpful to any kind of process of, just, life.

I think one of the greatest gifts you can give to someone is just access to the possibility of freedom that you don't have to be totally depressed and enslaved by your own environment.

Twitter fascinates me because it's real. It feels kind of unreal, but it makes very real things happen.

There's a huge cloud of shame around art and business being seen as bedfellows.

The stage show is, in some sense, highly theatrical. It's definitely not just a band in jeans playing rock and roll.

Thank God my best friend's a therapist.

I've been in a recording studio enough times to know that it is not the best place to multitask. Doing a couple of takes of a song and running out to check your email to talk to someone about video production really is not good.

I'd actually say that every musician is a human being, and that not everybody likes being social. But with music, there are all these ingredients to the business that have nothing to do with writing songs or playing an instrument.

I see everybody arguing about what the value of music should be instead of what I think the bigger conversation is, which is that music has value, it's subjective and we're moving to a new era where the audience is taking more responsibility for supporting artists at whatever level.

I have used Twitter for so many things, from places to stay, places to go, things to do, things I need, medical advice, you name it. Especially when I'm on tour, it really feels like I'm being taken care of by half a million people. It is like having a mom.

There's something advantageous about being a woman in rock versus, say, a woman in chemistry or construction. There's definitely a built-in sexism across the board, but I think you're afforded a degree of freedom in rock because, historically, the rules have been flexible.

One of the best things about Kickstarter and crowdfunding and the collapse of the music business is a lot of artists like me have been forced to face our own weird mess about ourselves and what we thought it meant to become musicians.

Neil Gaiman swooped into my life though another friend, Jason Webley, who knew we were fans of each other's work and introduced us via email. Neil and I, like me and Ben, just hit it off instantly.

Meditation, especially for people who don't know very much about it and think it's this very hippy dippy thing, can really be powerful, terrifying even, as it lifts the rug up on your subconscious and the dust comes flying out.

In some way, my fundamental feeling about music is that it's impossible to put a price tag on it. Human beings made music before they made a lot of other things, including tools.

If you stuck me in a room and gave me art-making tools but told me no one would ever see the results, I don't think I'd have much desire to make art. What I do comes from a deep desire to be seen and to see others.

You get the feeling that on a lot of days the audience for most music would kind of rather not be faced with the artist, especially because we've been educated to think that the artist are these special creatures are otherwordly and aren't like us.

There's no blueprint; getting married doesn't make you boring, having kids doesn't make you boring, having money doesn't necessarily have to make you boring.

The challenge in my life really is keeping the balance between feeling creatively energized and fulfilled without feeling overwhelmed and like I'm in the middle of a battlefield.

People had this idea about becoming rock stars packing stadiums instead of having the goal of becoming what musicians used to be in terms of how they would perform and connect people.