There were a lot of times that I'd rather be hanging out with friends, or out at a show, but instead I stay home and work on music. It's important to me that I make a lot of work and have a lot of variety and change for myself, because of the kind of personality I have. I have to bring my best self and my best work to the table.

I don't think of music as being a competition - what I make is exactly what I want it to be for me, and it's not better or worse than anything else. I'm just trying to be the best at what I am, or that I possibly can be. And when I've done that, I feel incredibly confident and there's nothing anyone can see to dampen that, but I don't think that because it means something to me, it has to necessarily mean something to other people.

I'm a real people pleaser, and for a while I was really desperate to make a kind of thing that would satisfy everyone, and I realized I was focusing so much on satisfying everyone else that I'd forgotten that the only real way to make anything true is to focus on making what you want to hear and saying what you want to say. Trying to people please with my art was a direct line to complete meltdown, writer's block situation, and I had to look inward before I could move past it.

There were a lot of times that I'd rather be hanging out with friends, or out at a show, but instead I stay home and work on music. It's important to me that I make a lot of work and have a lot of variety and change for myself, because of the kind of personality I have. I have to bring my best self and my best work to the table.

I love what I do and I'm super confident in it, but I also think of myself as humble in it. It's not better than what anyone else is doing, but I'm doing the best job of being exactly who I am, and doing what I want to do today. It feels so good to me that it doesn't really matter what it means to other people because that's more about them than me. I'm in a really great place with it.

Sometimes you need to turn things down in the interest of being able to do the weird, magical thing that you do that takes so much of your time, and effort, and requires so much of your vulnerability and presence. If you don't take care of yourself, that goes away and you don't have a leg left to stand on.

I will say this: it's important to work hard, but you have to know your limits. There's always another show, but if there's no "you"; if you have nothing left to give, nothing else happens. It all disappears.