I feel like it's very important that I'm doing what I'm doing, and I want to keep honoring that and try and do it as honestly as I can.

In the same way, I write some of my more difficult pieces when I'm at very happy stages in my life.

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

When I write - I always write on my own - I demo those songs on a four-track.

I feel like it's very important that I'm doing what I'm doing, and I want to keep honoring that and try and do it as honestly as I can.

Like I have to pretend like I'm a male rapper, that I got stacks and we're in the club, and what do I want to say. And then, when writing Rare I could just be PJ.

My town was even smaller. Only six hundred people. We didn't have a grocery store.