I think what really separates artists from the rest of the world is that artists feel like they have permission to keep exploring and expressing their process. Most people censor that because they don't think it's good enough. Everything is measured against this patriarchal hierarchy of value, as if one person's singing voice is more important than another's.

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.

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.

You need to release yourself of any expectation of what that material should be. Just start letting it be what it's naturally evolving into, even if it means just pulling words out of the dictionary and laying them one after another. Words are everywhere.

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.

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.