How you sound. How you look. Are you fat? Those are things that could be really irritating.
If you come across an American artist right now who has no political opinions or is afraid of talking politics, be very concerned.
If I were a guy, it would be, you know, just a different set of problems I have to carry along.
I feel like if I were to play the game completely and just get myself in a giant bottle of nail polish and put myself on display, I would feel like I had somehow cosmically lost. I feel like I'm taking a bunch of the ingredients and using some of them but not all of them and shuffling around and making people think I'm doing my job.
One thing about being a performer is you're not just doing an intellectual job behind a desk; you're out there performing and being looked at, being assessed for really superficial stuff.
I nurture my close relationships like priceless lamps. That's part of why the job itself is inherently difficult and kind of a paradox, because you're out there touring and traveling and going a million miles a minute, but the things that are keeping you steady and stable can be really hard to nurture when you're going fast, and your relationships, which are the number one thing that help me through.
I remember being a teenager and being really impressed by "let's sit around and b*tch" people, and I have so little time for those people nowadays.
We are human and our nature is to air...
There was a dance that everyone was doing that was heavily skewed with the power in one direction, but the dance was basically working, and then the dance got really disrupted with the first wave of feminism, and nobody found their footing yet - not the guys, not the women.
I kind of rely on my artist friends to make my physical music worth buying by having them all come together and create beautiful artwork that everyone is gonna want to own to support my record.
I feel like I've gotten to the point in my career and in my life where I can allow myself to write whatever comes into my head and not judge it too harshly.
I think I've always felt as a band and as a musician and a music business person, I've always felt like an outsider, period.
I've always felt like an outsider across the board, since day one. The challenge has been to simply not pay attention to my outsider or insider status and just do the work and play the shows and connect with the people. And not even bother to play this game of keeping score, which is what destroys you.
Comparing yourself to the people like you, comparing yourself to the people who aren't like you, looking at how many records you've sold, looking at the venue size you're selling out. None of that can even remotely measure how happy you are.
If I simply do what I've always done, it's never failed me.
You tour and you work hard and you take care of your fans and very real things lead to other real things. There's never been some fantastic fluke or break in my career, it has all been very slow and steady.
I don't try to make anybody outside happy.
What I have found is, so much of that is like a Chinese finger trap: the more you play to the dark, the more you will get trapped in the dark, and if you just play to the light and focus on the people that don't misunderstand you and focus on the audience that does celebrate you and focus on the people who aren't trying to tear you down, all that other stuff eventually erases itself because it has nothing to feed on.
The key is to just focus on the spots where the love is real, because you can just drive yourself crazy focusing on the negativity, focusing on the relationships that are irreparable and just aren't going to work, trying to convince the haters that you are indeed lovable. So much of that is wasted energy.
Men find powerful women so threatening, and finding a partner was starting to look laughable, because I would be really attracted to guys and they would just be so threatened and I didn't like feeling threatening, I didn't want to feel threatened, I didn't want to feel like I was towering over anybody.
I never wanted to grow a thicker skin; I felt a real sense of pride in my thin skin, and in a weird way, I still do, because it's my thin skin that allows me to empathize with other people. It's the thing that allows me to create vulnerable art. It's the thing that allows me to create other feelings and make songs that actually grab people and touch people. I feel like I've spent my life fighting that thicker skin because I don't want to become an embittered asshole.
I think you can't have this discussion and you can't have a discussion about feminism and the consciousness of the world without having a discussion about what has happened to men lately. They're holding the other side of the bag.
It's fine for people to say, "If you can't stand the heat and if you can't stand the criticism, then just don't use the Internet"; unfortunately, that is not an option. The Internet is where we make our living and where we make our work, especially if we're independents and we cannot afford to not engage, because that's where our business is driving from. It's just not an option.
When you really look back and take the wider perspective, it makes total sense that if the status quo is to remain the way it is, women will not be lauded and applauded for bonding with and helping each other, because it would destroy the world order if women organized; it would topple the whole thing. And so, it makes perfect sense to me that the current order of things would encourage the cat fights and encourage the comparisons and encourage the girl-on-girl hate that you see just being promoted everywhere.
Sometimes I have a terrible feeling that I am dying not from the virus, but from being untouchable.
