I think when you're writing from your own life, it's hard because you realize that people have their own assessment of how they look, and they don't know how you will describe them.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

Even if, personally, I'm in a place of contentment or solidity, I feel like it's hard not to look out into American culture and see vast inequity, widespread institutionalized violence and racism and transphobia and environmental destruction. It's hard to be in this world and feel a sense of innate satisfaction at all. There's plenty of things to feel unsettled about.

Rihanna has guts and she always seems to be singing from someplace honest, dark and fierce.

I don't think you need to sound like from where you're from. But I think there is something magical and powerful about encompassing something fully and singularly.

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.

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.