Sometimes I wish it were a simpler world. I love and hate people. When I say I hate people, I really truly mean it. Sometimes I think everyone should be dead, that the animals would be better off without people. But sometimes I go into the square and I look at all the people passing me by and it fulfills me -as long as they don't bother me. As long as they just walk past and don't ask me for anything, it's fine. I almost wish I could think about it in a mundane way.

I deteriorate. I might tell you something one day and then something else another day. You fold in on yourself and that's why this whole artistry thing is the devil. It's evil. I hope I don't succumb to it.

One of my struggles is that I'm a glutton. There's always those very simple, long, old-ass things, but they're very real to me, and I'm sitting in them, and they're swirling in my mind all the time. I tell people about it and they think, "Why don't you just go and make some money, go get a big-screen TV, or look at the Internet." Or they say, "Go create some introspective art." I just want to explode. I don't know how everybody else is able to walk around so calm. It's amazing to me when I see people walking so calmly down the street. I envy them, but I also kind of hate them.

Music didn't really occur to me. Michael Jordan and Batman were my favorite two entities then. Michael Jackson was there, but I didn't really get into Bob Dylan, for instance, until I was in my 20s. The record I heard of his that got me interested in singing was Knocked Out Loaded, which is what many people consider to be his worst record.

The only way for me to give a good performance is to make myself extremely uncomfortable - and it just so happens that being on stage makes me extremely uncomfortable.

I don't think talent has anything to do with inspiration. Inspiration creates talent. People prioritize innate talent too much. It gives them license to walk around and act like assholes. I think I straddle a line between being innately talented and having had to put in some work. You ever go to a party where there are a lot of creative people and they feel like they have license to just act any kind of way? I'm not really a moral person myself, but they just tend to never ever be sincere because they believe their art or the fact that they are artists makes them holy in some way.

That's not to say I came from the streets or anything - most of the time I was on my grandmother's back porch. I was kept in a constant state of amniotic fluid.