I got to speak to Missy Elliott on the phone and she was like, 'I see you and just keep doing your thing,' and to hear that was incredible.

The greatest blessing is that, within all of this, I've still been challenged every day to question and show who I am.

I quit piano and violin because it felt too rigid. It was just my thing, something I fell in love with from a very early age.

Half of my family is in Los Angeles, so my cousin was the first person to play me, like, Snoop Dogg, and I would always feel like 'Omg I shouldn't be listening to this,' and my other cousin was the first to introduce me to Aaliyah, so every time I'd go to the West Coast, I'd get those West Coast vibes.

I was shaped in college into a performance artist. I never really thought of myself as being one singular thing. I think of myself as an artist and I feel no restrictions when it comes to how I want to portray what I want to portray.

I was working on a piece for one of the things I was dancing to and I needed to have original music. I didn't know where to begin, I'm so bad at computers, and I remembered that he actually made music. I asked Astro Raw if he'd be interested in scoring and he said yes.

For the name Lion Babe, we are a little avant-garde, a little left. And with bands like Blondie, Pink Floyd, or Jamiroquai, you don't know they're bands, you just kind of hear the name and you're like 'What is it?' so that was the kind of thing we wanted to do.