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

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

When I began writing songs, there was a pretty direct line between what was happening in my life and what I wrote about. So my first album was really all about my failed attempts to make a particular relationship work.

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.

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 like garage band for writing because you only have crayons and there are only five crayons in the box. Your choices are limited and I find that to be very good for me.

I didn't realize at the time that if I wrote about something, I was going to have to talk about something. A lot. Ad nauseum.