“Words only suggest an experience, but the voice is that experience”.

"I learned how to use everything in the room as the music. A tune has to resonate with whatever is happening around it. So if people are talking, I let them talk. That just means they’re part of the music. I even had to learn the noise the dishwasher makes at this little cafe; I had to play in B flat, or it wouldn’t sound right".

Words are really beautiful, but they’re limited. Words are very male, very structured. But the voice is the netherworld, the darkness, where there’s nothing to hang on to. The voice comes from a part of you that just knows and expresses and is. I need to inhabit every bit of a lyric, or else I can’t bring the song to you–or else it’s just words".

"The way you look doesn’t mean shit if you can’t sing, or if you’re mean to people. It doesn’t mean shit if you’re not truthful with yourself. I have very different ideas about beauty than the rest of the world".

"And the whole world is so anti-life, especially a world ruled by men who don’t want to sit, listen and understand what life is all about. There’s so many countless details to just being alive that just knowing what love is or what pain is or what the reason is or all this amazing wonder and really hard, hard lessons that you’ve really got to be serious about. Or else you’re just fucking around".

"Sensitivity isn’t being wimpy. It’s about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom".

"the music aims at what’s really going on underneath … not what people pretend to be or what they hope they can buy at a store. There are really majestic qualities about people that can be reached through music. People are incredible to me even though I’m healthily cynical sometimes. It’s because we are spirits and the whole tension is that we don’t know that we are. Yet, music is able to touch this".

"people grow up repressed from the spirit, day by day by day. Cable TV, it’s fucked. It’s misogyny, it’s birth, death, work, it’s misery, it’s power. It’s fuckin’ hicks".