Putting your ego aside and confronting your weaknesses and just letting things happen is hard. Not to use a Scientology term, but it's difficult to do an emotional or an artistic audit.
Annie E. ClarkThere's always something extremely personal in the songs, but I may change the point of view from what I actually experienced.
Annie E. ClarkI have a phobia of checking voicemail. I watched a lot of TV as a kid, and everything is, like, you're gonna get kidnapped, or somebody's gonna die, or killer bees are going to take you out. I'm a very anxious person.
Annie E. ClarkI have the weirdest job. It's not every day that you get to stand up onstage and unload every ounce of your misanthropic bile onto a crowd of people, and they're like, "Cool! Hit us again!"
Annie E. ClarkWith the first kid, you micromanage it, making sure there's no hair out of place when it goes off to school. But by the third kid, it's more like, "Oh, you want to wear a splatter-painted, Hard Rock Cafรฉ T-shirt for seven days in a row and not brush your hair? Go for it. Be who you want to be."
Annie E. ClarkAn mp3 is a compressed form of data. It's not the full spectrum. It's never going to sound as good as a record. I think one thing people forget is that every technological advance we fetishize had its place in time. CDs are usually an hour long because that's the amount a CD could hold - not because that's the optimal amount of time for any given musical expression. Side one and side two? That's a product of vinyl. But that's not necessarily dramatic form - you could argue that that was three acts.
Annie E. Clark