Mostly, the people in "the room" are paid lobbyists representing interests that could afford to pay them. No wonder policy isn't being made that helps smaller, independent musicians or those unaffiliated with a larger entity.

As I've gotten older, I have gotten a lot better at finding the pleasures of making music despite the business of it.

Lenelle Moïse's poems render the abstract - policy, disaster, history, diaspora - specific. Her words make the political not just personal, but corporeal: the beautiful system of the human body as canvas and subject, perfect in all its attendant complications and complexity, and still ruled, undeniably, by a warm, beating heart.

As a listener, I like a wide range of sounds.

I think I have come across as "unafraid" because I really cannot control what comes through me in my writing.

I always write from rhythm first, so if I need a song fast, I have to start there. Then I just threw some electric guitar at it.

When I'm recording something (especially because I produce my own music) I might consider how hard it would be to replicate a song on stage.