I think the thing you're seeing now with the music industry is that the people who have tight-knit communities are now able to really hold each other up because of the internet tools. And the really top-down pyramid scheme of major labels and typical superstars isn't sustainable anymore because the system has collapsed.
It would nice to live in a world where art can just be art!
I want to be happy. i want to make people happy. i do not need to be rich to do that.
The perfect tools aren't going to help us if we can't face each other and give and receive fearlessly, but more important, to ask without shame.
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.
It’s not easy to ask… asking makes you vulnerable.
I want to live in a world where Miley (or any female musician) can twerk wildly at 20, wear a full-cover floral hippie mumu at 37, show up at 47 in see-through latex, and pose semi-naked, like Keith & co, on the cover of Rolling Stone at 57 and be APPLAUDED for being so comfortable with her body.
There's a fundamental disconnection in society in the way we live, this way we live that we take so for granted, and we've become very separate from one another and we don't really take lot of time to realize that. And the math is overwhelming to the point of despair, but the answers could be so simple.
I've watched so many women, from Kathleen Hanna all the way up to Taylor Swift, whether they're pop artists or rock stars or fine artists or writers, it is the subhistory of female artists that if you're going to make art, you're also going to have a full-time job of defending your right to make art.
When I find myself having to share a meal with someone who simply wants to complain about the world, I almost feel myself wanting to crawl out of my skin and just sort of scurry away. But being able to pick up on that stuff and being able to easily identify the people walking towards the light instead of walking towards the darkness, that's a skill I'm very, very glad to see growing in myself.
It is terrifying to people when women step up and start owning the story that they have not owned. And I'm seeing so much of this, and it is a seismic shift.
I think performance art comes from a simple place of wanting to express things beyond just sound.
I have a handful of really close relationships in my life and I depend on those people heavily to carry me through and to help me stay steady.
If we can repair things emotionally, a lot of other things would follow.
All of my music, my stage show, my personality, my blog, my twitter feed, anything that's made me me, and a huge part of why people like and respect me, is that I just don't spend much energy on that other stuff. It's not worth it. It's a losing battle too. You're just screwed the minute you engage.
I think the Internet really sussed things into perspective. Because twelve years ago, I could spend my days on writing and running my band and touring and making posters and practicing with my band and working on my vocals, but I didn't spend a large pie chart of my time sifting through criticism as well, and nowadays I do, and all female artists do, because to be able to promote your work, you need to live in those spaces.
Our nature is to desperately want to believe and to take what we believe is the quickest path there even against our better judgment.
I maintain couchsurfing and crowdsurfing are basically the same thing — you're falling into the audience and you're trusting each other.
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.
If you love people enough, they will give you everything.
While we're over here blocked up in our departments and locked up in our own judgments and dealing with our own crazy problems, they're over there dealing with equivalent problems. One of the things that I am so frightened by lately is that men are having just as difficult a time striking a balance as we are.
There's a part of me that is really, really happy with all of my success lately because of what it can get me and what it can buy me in the fact that my music will hopefully reach more people. But it also makes me a little bit miserable because the minute the spotlight is on you, people start flinging sh*t at you for whatever reason.
There are so many people, so many artists, so many magazines, so many theater companies, so many people trying to raise money for so many things that it's easy to look around and just feel powerless or helpless, because even if you have some resources, you can't help everybody.
The cool thing too, as you get older, you get way better at identifying who's an ally and who isn't. And who has good, positive, "let's make all this sh*t better and let's try to have fun and fix sh*t" people as opposed to "let's sit around and b*tch and berate" people.
I feel that part of my life's artwork is creatively dealing with all this negativity and anger and rage and hatred coming from whatever corners it's coming from and somehow manifesting all of that anger into something positive, which is such a hard job.
