I think it's very disheartening and undermining to focus on nostalgia or youthful sentimentality as the lens through which you view art and culture, because then you feel like everything good already happened. I really just try to be in the present with music and just find the things that are invigorating and make me feel happy to be alive right now.

I've always loved writing. Doing that at the same time as playing music can be tiring.

I grew up outside of Seattle, and have lived here my whole life, and I think that there is a culture of questioning, and guilt. Almost an "anti-ambition." Like, an awareness, and then a subsequent guilt. But sometimes that progressive, liberal guilt is really obnoxious, too - in some ways, I think it's better to just own it. It's weird, that actually, the acknowledgement of privilege or the enactment of guilt can be as obnoxious as anything else. It's a never-ending rabbit hole. We're really in a rabbit hole right now, with this conversation. We're just spiraling down into the void.

From a self-conscious standpoint, it's hard to see myself on a screen in a way that isn't just me playing music or doing something silly.

No matter what people are struggling with, or based on whatever. Sexuality, ethnicity, economic status, size. I don't wish smallness for anyone. It's a terrible place to live.

The enemy of any artistic statement is to create something that no one cares about, in the sense they have no opinion either way.

After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music. It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise.