To be a great artist, you need to know yourself as best as you possibly can. I live my life and delve into my own psyche. Its more about exploring how I feel rather than making pale imitations of something that came before. We are unique beings, and the way we look at things is our own.
Bat for LashesI wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It's about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification. And in a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.
Bat for LashesMusic's free and music's for everyone to enjoy and express and interpret. It transcends countries and times and decades.
Bat for LashesI think the best cure is to stop doing the thing that you think you should be doing and go and have a bit of fun in another medium, maybe other crazy things.
Bat for LashesI did gardening and cooking and drawing and reading to try take the pressure off the music - just being eclectic and putting the fun back in and bringing more innocence in again is really important.
Bat for Lashes