I started to understand what the song could be about. The ache of nostalgia even for things we don't like, the commitment to keep moving despite that ache. It made me think of how I relate to my privilege - as a white person, as someone who grew up upper middle class.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.