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

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.

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 consumer of culture, I like a wide range of emotions to be touched in art. It's funny but on the other side of it, I do feel that people that are trying to sell culture would like to see a narrower range of expression from their content-makers. Easier to sell I guess.

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.

The only really weird part for me was making sense of the person on the TV at the same time as the person who I am friendly with and do something so friend-intimate with as text.

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.