A lot of music for me was about - I mean aside from the fun and challenge of writing and being really good friends with my bandmates - getting to perform.

There was a clarity to the Nineties. It was pre-9/11, before that anxiety kicked in that exists right now about the financial crisis or terrorism. We were all just going to move forward into the millennium and everything was always going to get better. Then, whoops, that didn't happen.

To me, that ugliness, that grotesqueness - that's the essence [of life]. That's where you realize, it's not about all the consonance and the harmony. It's all the parts that are wrong that help explain why we're drawn to something - what the mystery is - just as much as the beautiful things.

What I value most in new music today is strangeness, oddity. Passion. And humor. I listen to a lot of hip-hop because it combines so many things like that.

To be a fan is to be curious, and to be curious is to have openness... Part of being a fan is to allow 360 degrees of experience - to immerse without judgment. It's like a really fearless step forward into new experience. There's something that feels very timeless about fandom.

With Sleater-Kinney, we did a lot of improvisation in our live shows, and even our process of songwriting involved bringing in disparate parts and putting them together to form something cohesive.

It does feel great to be writing, but the process is sometimes excruciating.