I have learnt through doing interviews throughout my life that the way that somebody can write about something can change entirely how it was meant, or what actually happened.
I don't loathe interviews, I'm just one of those people who makes music because I find it difficult to talk.
I think I'm a maker of songs, and songs are like films or a picture: You put them over there, and they have nothing to do with you.
I think it does surprise me a bit when people have a very fixed idea of what I'm like, based upon the work that I do, which is something that is very separate.
I'm a visual artist myself and always have been so it's very natural for me to be very concerned with presentation, whether it's artwork or onstage.
The artists that I love- whether painters or filmmakers- it's because something resonates in me because I've felt it.
I make tiny wooden people with bits of hair. Puppets and things like that.
If I ever meet a writer or a painter, I don't presuppose that they are like the work they are presenting.
I think I've been interested in music since I was little.
I feel like "Not For Long" was one for me just because I got to work with two people that I looked up to...
You go back and look at some of the ancient writings that exist throughout the world about wars and it's the same; the human beings' articulation of events is the same. That really fascinated me.
In the past members of my family on both my mother's and father's side have fought in the war, in the first and second World Wars. Unfortunately, they're dead and I wasn't able to speak to them, but that was in our family history too.
Any of these contemporary war situations, whether civilian or soldier on either side - that's what I was interested in. The people who are being affected. Not so much the political speak at the top of the food chain, but the people who are affected by it on the ground.
I long ago learned that you can't expect people to interpret the songs in the way they had meant for you, as the writer.
Being a recording artist and having thousands of people listening to your music and singing your songs, and paying for it? It feels great!
But even when I do give interviews, I always come across as such a completely different person. It seems like there's no controlling it anyway.
Folk music was to strengthen and unify people, whether it was through an uprising and rebellion or whether is was through hard work, bringing in crops. But it was to strengthen each other and that's still what music is about today.
I am someone that follows the news and reads newspapers yet what do you believe and what don't you.
Everything from a lifetime's worth of collecting things. You know as we go through life, and something stays and ends up on your shelf and lives there until you die? Just those little things.
There is a thread connecting you no matter how far away you are from someone and you know I have two or three relationships in my life that are like that.
You can sing a very aggressive word in such a way that it's very funny. You can change words, completely turn them around on their head so that they mean exactly the opposite of what they are written down. There are endless possibilities which I think Diamanda Galás is doing already. She turns everything upside down by the way she sings it. She makes you feel nauseous or horrified or ridiculous just by her voice. I think that's an incredible power.
Like I have to pretend like I'm a male rapper, that I got stacks and we're in the club, and what do I want to say. And then, when writing Rare I could just be PJ.
I think a lot of people have an idealistic view - if you grow up in the country, there can't possibly be anything wrong with you.
Well, I don't really concern myself too much with what other people make of my work.
When I'm writing for rappers it's kinda like switching, "Okay, you're not PJ. Now you have to act like a rapper."
