I feel like you should always be questioning the genre you're doing. If you're doing something that sounds like a lullaby, it can be good to make it about someone stalking someone.
Nellie McKayYou have to reflect honestly what's around you in your music. I think a lot of people are just obsessed with their own relationships, so that is an honest reflection of what they see. A lot of people don't go much deeper than that.
Nellie McKayI got sent off to my grandmother's for five months and watched a lot of TV and had a lot of grilled cheese with butter on it - because she was English and put lots of butter on everything - and yogurt. The English are big on dairy products, you know? I'd have an earache, and she'd be like, "Here, have some milk." Wonderful woman, but she had kind of screwed-up nutrition ideas.
Nellie McKayIn terms of content, a lot of rap is crap, with all the sexism and homophobic bullshit. It's incredible how rappers are always preaching nonconformity - you know, "I'm just gonna go my own way and be my own man and blah blah blah" - but they're the first ones to do so many things that they have to do. They have to do that hip-hop thing, a certain way of walking, and it's so conformist.
Nellie McKayI was in school for jazz voice, which is the dumbest way to spend $35,000 a year. I just felt like a rip-off of good jazz singers. I didn't feel like I was being anything special, and I always wanted to be special. It's like you know you have something inside you that's gonna make you different than everybody else and make you somebody in this life, but you wish you could figure out what it is, because at most things, you're either mediocre or really, really bad.
Nellie McKayI'm just kind of sick of music. I don't know what I want to do. It's not that I feel suicidal or anything, but I just want to end this life. I just want to be somebody else now. Sometimes I feel like that. You always think, "If I just cut my hair really short and dye it brown and put on a little goatee, no one would know it was me, and I could..."
Nellie McKay