I’m really drawn to the uncompromising realness of natural process: It’s unadorned. It’s not very pretty.
I’m interested in the crevices, and the grotesque, and the unsavory. That started out when I was young. I’ve never quite been able to shake that.
The natural world operates by its own set of rules. The animal world, all the places that are feral and ungovernable, that’s where I find a lot of inspiration. There is just as much beauty there, but there is also decay and violence.
Twitter is sort of version of labeling, except with 140 characters instead of a labelmaker. It’s the way of calling things out for what they are, wearing badges. Twitter is like the new Scarlet Letter.
To be a fan is to be curious, and to be curious is to have openness. Part of being a fan is to allow 360 degress of experience – to immerse without judgment. It’s like a really fearless step forward into new experience. There’s something that feels very timeless about fandom.
No matter what people are struggling with, or based on whatever. Sexuality, ethnicity, economic status, size. I don’t wish smallness for anyone. It’s a terrible place to live.
I think closing-off is the most detrimental thing we can do as people. Also, the idea of not judging oneself.
To me, curiosity is married to optimism. And that’s where a lot of my motivation comes from. A lot of my way out of depression and anxiety is that intersection between optimism and curiosity. Because it means taking a step forward with the hope that there will be discovery.
You do have to live through things, and to live through things is to observe want, and to observe lacking. Even if the hunger is a curiosity.
What I value most in new music is strangeness, oddity. Passion. And humor. I listen to a lot of hip-hop because it combines so many things like that.
As a kid, before I got into music, I did all the drama classes, went to theater camp in the summers, so it wasn’t totally a foreign world.
I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted.
My favorite kind of musical experience is to feel afterward that your heart is filled up and transformed, like it is pumping a whole new kind of blood into your veins. This is what it is to be a fan: curious, open, desiring for connection, to feel like art has chosen you, claimed you as its witness.
Nostalgia is recall without the criticism of the present day, all the good parts, memory without the pain. Finally, nostalgia asks so little of us, just to be noticed and revisited;.
That’s why all those records from high school sound so good. It’s not that the songs were better – it’s that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now.
To become a fan of something, to open and change, is a move of deliberate optimism, curiosity, and enthusiasm.
There is something freeing in seeing yourself in a new context. People have no preconceived notion of who you are, and there is relief in knowing that you can re-create yourself.
I never want to contribute to the corrosiveness of wanting someone to stay hidden.
It’s important to undermine yourself and create a level of difficulty so the work doesn’t come too easily. The more comfortable you get, the more money you earn, the more successful you are, the harder it is to create situations where you have to prove yourself and make yourself not just want it, but need it. The stakes should always feel high.
It was about knowing you were going to be underestimated by everyone and then punishing them for those very thoughts.