I'm a lot more observational than personal in my writing. My writing is mostly a lot of questions without answers.

I'm a lot more observational than personal in my writing. My writing is mostly a lot of questions without answers.

I'm a bit of a magpie: whatever I see or hear or read feeds into the songs.

I read a lot by female psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, who wrote prominent biographies of Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud because she studied with all of them. She had this unbelievable insight into contemporary psychoanalysis. What is so interesting is that she wrote her life, and she knew that her life would be about these men, and it didn't stop her from leading an incredibly successful academic career. But her strange self-awareness that she was going to bookmark these men's lives is really interesting to me.

The female psyche is inherently self-sufficient, because female sexuality is inherently self-sufficient. I think women are maybe more comfortable, or women are able to find physical beauty in each other that doesn't terrify them.

Rilke has a very bizarre relationship to women because his mother had an older child, a girl who died when she was a baby. So when Rilke was born she named him Sophie and dressed him as a girl until he was 7. And psychologically, the repercussions of that made him the genius that he is. By the time he was 35, he was continuously falling in love with older women, mother figures, spiritual mothers.

I feel like I'm creeping closer to finding the situation that triggers songwriting, which is obviously an extreme of an emotion.