I think I'll feel out of place wherever I go on earth, forever. But that's fine. I have to make my peace with that.

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

I've always loved books by the Bronte sisters. I love Jane Austen, too. I'm more influenced by people like her than by pop culture.

I definitely tell things at arm's length but that is conscious. No part of me wants everybody to know what's going on.

I know how ridiculous this sounds because of the job I do but I don't believe in romanticism and make-believe.

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.

My songs are not pretty. They're what I call optimistic realism.