You make something, and you really have fun with it, and you try to put emotion in it, and at the end of the day, you have no idea how the tide is going to fall. You don't know if everyone's going to like it, if everyone's going to hate it, if it's going to be like you're a media darling, or all of a sudden you're a sellout. You have no idea.

I go through insanity before a show. It's not really a process but it's like absolute mortal fear.

And people are just people, They shouldn't make you nervous. The world is everlasting, It's coming and it's going.

When I think of my art tribe - you know, my peeps - there are certain people who are autobiographers that I really love. But for the most part, overwhelmingly, my tribes are the surrealists and the storytellers, in song and literature.

Yeah. My singing and my songs were very influenced by all of that. People would come up to me and ask, Is that a Billie Holiday song? I'd say, No, it's my song. The lyrics would be in my style, but the songs would be very jazzy.

I was a kid, and I was very excited to experience this whole new world. And everything was fun, everything from, oh, wow, we get bananas - I'd only seen them in picture books, you know - to, like, the diversity of the neighborhood and to explore Judaism for the first time. It was really hushed in the Soviet Union.

Songs kind of live in a timeless place for me, and since I make records I dunno, about every two-and-a-half to three years or something like that, it's just not enough to put all the songs that I have, no matter how much I put.