I was about 17 or 18 when I first started performing in public. I had a teacher when I was a freshman in college and she came up to me afterwards and said she had been crying while I had been singing, and it really shocked me.

There are so many more productive things to do than sit around feeling shame and guilt. Beyond touching on shame and guilt in a perfunctory manner, I wouldn't bother with that at all.

Every year I used to write a musical inspired by John Waters, and I would get all my friends together and put on this perverse, emotional, tragic musical.

I think, with music in general, people just inevitably connect with feeling. The opportunity to hear expressed feeling. And that's what has always drawn me towards music. It's something where, by connecting to someone else's voice, I feel less lonely. I feel more alive. I feel more connected to the world and to the rest of humanity. Sometimes a voice can be like a lifeline.

Diane Cluck is a virtuosic talent with an emotionality that feels at once ancient and alien. Her mastery of her voice as an ecstatic instrument is so compelling.

The creative process is just a process and you can't really separate it from life. Growing your hair is a creative process. Your body is creating hair. Being alive is a creative process. Whether it's growing something in the garden or growing a song, the material accumulates. It's the process of being alive; it's the passage of time. Things change.

I think what holds people up in creative processes is the expectation of what it is they're doing. It's also the sense of judgement, you know, people editing themselves.