I'm really nostalgic for Malibu area because I've spent so much time there. People don't think of California as having a history.

Political art never goes away. I started watching The West Wing show recently and I'm actually learning about how the government works in a way. It's kind of embarrassing.

Malibu history is interesting to me. My mom's family was one of the early families in California, so there's history going back to the 1840s or '50s. They came over in the Gold Rush, actually. I have all this guilt about raising my daughter in the East. Coco's very anti-California. It's her way of rebelling.

Clothes are signifiers and symbols of how people communicate with each other.

I think of myself as unconventional. I maybe always had a problem with authority, like a stubbornness about what's expected - despite wanting to get some recognition through performing - but also not always wanting to do the expected thing.

I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.

If you don't fit into a certain type, there's a lot of strength in just being who you are.