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

I really don't know what to do when my life is not chaotic.

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.

I've noticed that as someone who has done music and creative things in Washington state and Portland, to kind of toot your own horn, or admit, "I'm going for it. I'm hustling," is not exactly the norm. Which is weird, because you go to New York, or LA, or anywhere else, you've got to be gunning for it - and you should be - you're part of a fast-moving stream of other people who are really ambitious. People move here to work less. So, to say that you're hustling all the time, and going for it, is kind of a little bit against the grain here.

As a kid, before I got into music, I did all the drama classes, went to theater camp in the summers, so it wasn't totally a foreign world.

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.

Twitter is sort of version of labeling, except with 140 characters instead of a labelmaker. It's the way of calling things out for what they are, wearing badges. Twitter is like the new Scarlet Letter.