He [ the son]'s grown up listening to all types of music, and the natural form of rebellion is to find the one genre that maybe he hasn't listened to and to make that his thing.

I always have looked at "indie" as a term of "independence." Never associated a sonic gesture with that in the same way that pop music has always meant "popular" to me it didn't define a sound. And I think now that has been the context for things. If something is indie, it almost has this sonic association with it, or pop has become this term of shame almost, like, bubblegum sweet pop.

I actually was a ballet dancer - I studied ballet from three until 13 - but like very seriously, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a contemporary ballet dancer. I wanted to go to Juilliard.

When you're younger, you get shoved a lot. You don't really have a say-so.

The Hadley Street Dream is a tribute to making a vision come to life. My father built a compound on a dessert city block, he saw something in that space we couldn't see. It was years later the album was born right there on Hadley St. He built the studio I started recording the album at.

I have gone through many difference phases in my love affair with hip-hop.It evolves, your taste. It sometimes deepens, in terms of what's out; sometimes it's not as deep in terms of what's out. So it's definitely an evolution. I don't ever claim to be a hip-hop head.

I actually produced other people's vocals for a long time when I first signed my publishing deal and I had just sort of decided that I only wanted to be a writer. I would be in all of these writing sessions, and a lot of times my publisher would say, "You should get a demo singer to sing it because then it doesn't identify as a Solange song."