You can never learn enough about music.
As a woman of color, I always have to be at 150 percent and better than everybody in the room to be considered competent.
Growing up, I never really felt like anything was my own. I moved a lot, and I never belonged anywhere.
Whenever I’ve tried to ingratiate myself to an existing community, I tend to give too much, to become whatever it is they want me to be. It’s something I do automatically – I’ve learnt to immediately adapt.
When you’re an adult, things mellow out. I think when you’re a teenager and you are sad and the world is ending, everything is about that one sadness.
All I want to do at karaoke is sing Mariah Carey.
The whole ‘grunge-girl’ comparisons certainly are the easiest to pick out, and I appreciate that music journalists are rushed.
On tour, I don’t drink, because I don’t think in any other job you are supposed to get to work and drink whisky.
I wanted to take up guitar because playing piano is a little harder. Carrying a keyboard around is harder, and finding a real piano is much harder, and I wanted to play live more, so I figured a guitar would be easier to carry around.
I’ve stopped wanting a home, I think, because I’ve been on tour all my life, basically.
I remember I took a music course in junior year of high school, and some girl brought in ‘Teardrops On My Guitar,’ and she was like, ‘Isn’t this song great?’ And everyone was like, ‘Who’s Taylor Swift?’ And now, every time I listen to Taylor Swift, I remember that moment.
I was a film major because, for some reason, I thought that that was a creative job that had more job opportunities. I don’t know what logic I was following, but that was my impression at the time.
On one hand, I think it’s very important to talk about race and talk about gender, because if it’s not talked about, then we won’t progress. What I have a problem with is when it becomes another form of tokenization, of shrinking me into a symbol instead of a multilayered, female Asian artist.
Honestly, in the music business, it’s all about being cool or being the newest thing or being the ‘It’ person, and I’ve tried really hard to be what is expected of me or what would be advantageous to my career, and I just reached the point where I said, ‘No, I’m an emotional loser. I can’t pretend to not care.’
I think my whole identity is formed around not knowing where I’m from. It might even be that I find comfort in that confusion.
I think your ego gets in the way of making something good because it kind of blinds you from the actual art.
It’s nice to know there’s a big world with many perspectives. I tend to get so stuck in my own small world easily, and going out into the world reminds me that I’m not the center of the world – in a good way.
I always have strong urges to sabotage myself. Whenever someone says they like something about my music, I tend to not want to do that anymore. It’s not even that I don’t like it anymore: it’s that I keep trying to find ways for people to dislike me.
You always want what you can’t have, and that all-American thing, from the day I was born, I could never enter that dream. That all-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained.
I don’t set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it’s about.
When I go onstage and am performing the way I want to… I finally feel like myself.
I hate that my opinions are gonna be on record… that my opinions of other artists are going to be on record.
I don’t think ‘bleak’ is a bad thing.
I don’t think I have the kind of creativity to write fiction.
Pages: 1 2
