I grew up going to punk shows, that kind of thing - I don't wanna make pop punk! - but I like the idea of people going totally crazy and it being really intimate, loud and super-aggressive, but combining that with pop music.
I feel like vocals are to music what portraits are to painting. They're the humanity. Landscapes are good and fine, but at the end of the day everyone loves the Mona Lisa.
I was raised in a Catholic household and went to a Catholic school, and my childhood brain perceived medieval Catholicism as an action movie: There's this crazy omnipresent guy who can destroy you at any moment.
I approach music - and this sounds crazy - as though I'm Phil Spector, and I'm cranking out these pop stars and forcing them to do all this stuff - except they're all me. But I'm not, like, transgendered.
I don't own anything designer.
When an artist, or whomever, moves from their scene to the bigger pond, it starts getting crazy, because all of a sudden people don't respect you, and you have to start being a lot more aggressive than you would normally be.
I find it really hard to throw myself into something artistically where I'm making up a whole character and finding something for that character to do.
I write music better in the winter, I prefer making music when it's dark.
I love a lot of very sentimental music, but I shouldn't necessarily be the person who makes it.
I'm just very obsessed with Japanese stuff in general.
I don't know if I would ever have costume changes - usually I just end up taking off my shoes, I get so sweaty, and... I just need to be comfortable.
I can tell really early on in a painting if I'm going to toss it or not.
I listen to a lot of medieval music.
If you look at the way people behave at shows, icons are now musicians; they are the people that we worship.
I get offers to do huge-budget music videos with big production companies all the time, but I have no interest.
I have a lot of Japanese friends: I grew up in Vancouver, and there's this huge Japanese population over there.
You rarely find someone who sings really well and who produces really well; it's a problem, and I just think it's a missing link in the music scene.
I know texture is really important, but I think texture and stuff precedes songwriting a lot of the time these days.
In America there's lot of cool cities, but in Canada there's, like, well, Vancouver, Toronto and Halifax may be cool, but they're so expensive. Montreal is the only city that's affordable but also has buses and culture.
I just can't perform well unless I'm wearing jeans.
I definitely see the voice as an instrument: It makes great drums, great synth pads, great everything.
I feel like gender lines are changing. A couple of years ago, it wasn't nearly as OK for guys to like girly-sounding music. But all of a sudden a lot of my guys friends who would like have been really disdainful of female singers are way more accepting.
I'm so sick of my own music that I don't know if I can edit another video, which involves hundreds of hours of listening to your own song again and again and again. It becomes so grating after a while.
I prefer making videos to making music.
It takes me probably about four hours to get into the groove [with making music]. And it's really important for me to not break the groove.
