I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

Everything from a lifetime's worth of collecting things. You know as we go through life, and something stays and ends up on your shelf and lives there until you die? Just those little things.

Maybe you're a singer or not, but what taps into the soul leads to the heart, and that's really what I came away with, with the starting point for the record being that I could speak as a human being and feel things very deeply.

It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent. Therefore I keep reaching for instruments I don't particularly know how to play, and then I become excited. That gives me energy to want to make new things, and it forces me to hear things in new ways, which then can only help to say things in a new way.

I would never feel confident enough to express my views and opinions as the right ones because I just don't think that's possible. There are so many sides to everything that nobody is right or wrong.

You can sing a very aggressive word in such a way that it's very funny. You can change words, completely turn them around on their head so that they mean exactly the opposite of what they are written down. There are endless possibilities which I think Diamanda Galás is doing already. She turns everything upside down by the way she sings it. She makes you feel nauseous or horrified or ridiculous just by her voice. I think that's an incredible power.

I really don't pay too much attention; I don't go out of my way to read any interviews.