I like costumes. I am always dressing up - I'm very English like that.
I was such a tomboy. I had absolutely no bosom, and I wore my hair really short - shaved, like a boy.
I have a huge scarf from Hermes that I bought the day I signed my record deal. I had never had an Hermes scarf. And I ran to buy one, thinking, Now, this is a symbol, I need one, I need an Hermes scarf, which actually now Im quite embarrassed about. Most of the time I twist it so much that no one notices it, and just bundle it around me.
Singing is the rawest thing. Having been naked in films or naked in photo shoots, it's nothing compared to singing. It's absolute nakedness. You are stripped bare!
I always lived with guitarists. When they would leave, I would just pick up their acoustic guitars and start doing finger picking and write.
I always have lipstick, and use the same lipstick for my cheeks as blush, so that it looks very natural. It's a good trick I learned from my mother. I like NYX or MAC because they have a lot of pigment and they're matte.
Music, for the moment, has been this hidden thing for me. For the first time, I am master of something. I am not used by someone else, like in movies or pictures, where you always have the happiness or disappointment of knowing it's you seen through someone else's point of view. You go to see a film and half of the pretty scenes are not in it-the ones you liked. Living with this frustration all the time, suddenly music came as the best thing for me at home, where no one can tell you anything.
There is a thing where I get scared watching other people, and really realize, My God, their happy lives are going to stop. Sometimes you feel that people have 19 jokers in their back pocket and, because of the way they're living, you're like, Do you know that this is not going to happen over and over again forever?
It doesn't help that we are three generations of actresses, who are always obsessed with losing time. But on the other side, historically, women have much more time on their hands than before. It goes together-the more time we have, the more we're flipping out about how we've got to deal with it.
As soon as it's behind computers and machines, which the majority of the planet loves, I find it cold. I need to hear breathing. I like the idea of the mic being a captation of everything that's happening around.
I wish I could be more serious about painting. I think there may be something going on there and I should pursue it. I'm very old-fashioned - even with the music. I realize, while I have so much respect for the kookiness of people who go for it, who paint with their eyes closed, I am superclassical.
It took me so long to get to the music, where that was what I wanted to do all my life. It took me so long to realise that it wasn't really movies that I wanted to do, but to be on stage singing.
I'm horrified most of the time. I wish it was more complicated, but at the same time, each time I try to complicate it I hate it because I hate the idea of writing to impress.
There's so many good books, but I'm always like, "I'm sorry, I have five more Faulkners to read, I can't be bothered." Most of the time when you try, you fall on the wrong one.
Music always has to do with vibrations for me. I love to record everyone's heartbeats, in way. None of us beats at the same pace and a song is a magical moment where different entities, for a split second, meet up.
Yeah, you always have to be there and remind people of you. It's complicated when you do music, or when you do anything in general. You need time. I don't know if it's because of the weather or what, but [Canadians] seem to have a relationship to time that I like very much.
What I realized is that the desire for making 'Places' came from the fact that I've got this strange situation with having been born in the glitter, born on the other side of the mirror that everyone fantasizes about.
I try to not listen to all the girls I admire musically - like Nina Simone - just so I don't find myself imitating them, even if it's subconsciously.
The whole process of music for me is something absolutely honest and really naked and bare, so I never forced myself to write in French.
I have a strong and strange character, and I've rarely met directors who knew what to do with this character. One of the few who did was my father, and in the theatre, Arthur Nauzyciel.
It's true that the biggest value of life is that it's going to stop. I was thinking when I was in New York the last time that all that we see that has importance is man-made. It isn't nature-made. And when I was looking through the window, looking at New York, I was so moved by humanity's desire for immortality-because that's what it is.
