Really, everything for me comes from "Manifestra." It was an incredible gift of a song; it really describes an important moment in my life.

I am really pleased to hear each of my songs described as a total surprise. This is what I want!

It's funny because my main awkwardness around writing the song had little to do with the method.

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.

I learned how to have a little bit of distance when I explained songs and a little bit of distance when I wrote them. I think this is more interesting any way in art.

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

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.