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.

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 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 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.

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.

I wanted to touch on the piece where often politicians use "god" to excuse their actions.