I think both you and I, we live in a world of fiction and stories.

I started to write before I went to SUNY Purchase music conservatory. As an audition I submitted what I now think are really awful songs, but I guess they saw something in them.

Maybe I am skipping over the city and going from very personal things to the world, from internal experience to giant, far-away-from-space experience.

I feel like there's just so much of everything that I don't know what people have heard and what they haven't heard. I think with the fact that there's the Internet and that people can share home-made recordings, I think a lot of the songs do get to be heard, even if it's not the best quality, or there's clinking glasses or it's just piano and voice, people can at least hear the song.

I figured, 'If I ever get offered a chance to sign a deal, I'll only do it if I got to do it how I want.' So my contract is structured in such a way that I'm really protected.

Pickle jars are just pickle jars, and pickles are just pickles.

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.