The classical music scene was completely unfamiliar to me. A lot of people think of older generations and stuffiness. But it's not. You listen to the Overture of 1812, and you can hear a rock n' roll catharsis.
I guess part of my ambivalence about pursuing music as well as acting is that acting is already one of the most difficult careers to create for yourself, I must be insane to embark on creating two careers in two of the most difficult fields. But I have really different ambitions with music; I just want to stay in love with music. I want it to continue to be a means of expression for me that feels like it's mine, and something that feels community-based.
The idea of choosing something that you want to be, that you identify as, at a young age and pursuing that without question - for me that was acting.
I guess I was always envious of people who got to move to New York for college because they got to see the city that I, perhaps, was pretty jaded by with new eyes and discover for themselves that Andy Warhol was dead.
There's something really natural to me about being what they call in the business a "hyphenate." Being a musician-actor or writer-musician-actor.
Making music is so much more self-motivated. It's my own music. It's my own time. I don't have a team around me that's helped me make everything.
Aligning my music with something that feels morally and politically passionate to me feels good.
I'm going to be a better actor, or I'm going to try to be a better actor. I'm going to try to be a better musician. I'm going to be an artist instead of just this one thing.
You don't have that interaction with the audience when you're acting for film; you're kind of acting in a vacuum. You're acting for a disinterested grip who just wants to reply to his wife about what time he'll be home for dinner. Everyone else on a film set is also there because they're paid to be there. They're not there because they're passionate about what you do necessarily.
As soon as I saw myself beginning to be way too comfortable on a film set or TV set, and not stimulated by it the way that I had been that had brought me to want to be there professionally and creatively, was the moment that I started getting really, really sad. I decided, "Okay, I just want to actually be here, how can I make this be interesting for me?"
When I have no idea what to do with how I'm feeling, I generally make a song out of it.
I love acting so much, but listening to music and making music has been the greatest savior for me.
I realized that I really didn't like the sound of the ukulele so much so I started playing the guitar.
I started playing music when I was 18. My heart was just broken so badly that I decided that I really wanted to start playing music. It felt like the only thing that I could do in response to that. And I've been playing ever since.
I had no kind of work ethic and I always felt that music - especially rock 'n' roll - was a more for boys.
Growing up with my dad being a musician, it seemed like a male centric world to me. I just didn't know many girls playing guitar.
All my best girlfriends play guitar now, which is kind of a funny world to live in.
Perhaps like attracts like, and that's why I found myself in a circle of women who are so passionate about making music.
It takes a lot of courage to be a performer.
Even though I was performing all the time as an actress and I was doing all of these plays as a kid, there's a vulnerability about being a musician that you don't get [when] you perform somebody else's work.
You perform the thing that you made, that's inside of you, and to subject that to any kind of scrutiny is terrifying. It's still terrifying to me.
If you're not an actor, or if you're any other kind of artist, there's this sense that, "I must express this thing." Why make a painting if you don't feel like you have to for something inside of yourself? Why make a song if you don't feel like you have to because there's something that you need to get out? And when you're an actor and you're not performing text that you've written, I think there's this bizarre disconnect with the must-ness of it.
