I have been doing choreography my whole life, and it's so important to make that marriage between music and the body.

I had to appreciate other things about music, like the writing and the cadence and dealing with producers. I became a student. I wanted to learn the actual idea of what this industry was before I could creatively speak a lot of the things that I wanted to speak.

At a label, you are confined to the team you have, but I did all my solo work myself, and that makes you more agile and able to go into weirder corners.

The only person who can confine you is yourself.

I like to make people dream and think and imagine and learn and study. Nowadays, music is so literal - it's telling you, "This is how it is," and my music's the opposite. I come from an era where lyrics were full of imagery and metaphor, and that's all I know.

There's always going to be a fight between mainstream and underground because the mainstream is a very small bubble, and the underground scene is a very small bubble, and they both see themselves as secret societies.

Major labels limit you, but I also learned my tricks from getting around that.