Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People want to see a magical fairytale story, but the reality is that I spent a lot of time making music alone in my bedroom.
I just kind of, like, know who I am. I think that comes from having an incredibly strong sense of purpose for a very long time.
The only thing I wanted to do in my music is be human and communicate all the aspects of that, which often means being vulnerable.
When I got to NYU, I had applied based on playing folk music, and they said, 'You're the banjo girl,' so I thought ,'OK, I'm the banjo girl.'
I've never made R&B. I've never made gospel. I've never made hip-hop - I don't think I'm going to, but I just want to keep challenging myself.
I think, as a musician, or even as a citizen of the world, I just want to be a part of something or feel connected to something bigger than myself.
I titled it 'Alaska' because the song sort of represents everything that happened in my life surrounding a hiking trip I took for a month in Alaska.
The reality is my career started with a song that wasn't finished and a video I didn't know was going on the Internet. It happened so out of my control.
I've always been a very visual creator. I make mood boards or sit with coloured pencils and scribble and try and figure out what I'm trying to work through musically.
I'm kind of a terrible musician. I'm a very functional musician. I play just about every instrument in a band setting, functionally. But I should not be taking solos.
I remember going to church at home on Christmas in 2016, and people wanted to take my photo. When I'm home in Maryland, I don't leave the house. That's a weird feeling.
Being 'back in my body' means being able to do the things I love, but do them in the way I love, and in my way, and in my time, giving myself the opportunity to just be me.
The reality of my life is it's about 25 percent music, and everything else I do is so I can get that 40 minutes later to go play. And it is unquestionably worth every second of it.
I listened to birds and crickets, looking for the ways that rhythm appears most naturally in the world. I listened to the Smithsonian's field recordings of pygmy choirs from Africa.
I feel really held in being vulnerable. That's always been the kind of music that I've gravitated to as well, but to feel really supported by my audience in that is a real privilege.
You need music that is compelling and intellectual, but you also need music that just feels good and you can laugh about and dance to, and I think I'm trying to marry the two in some way.
What I love about going home is that, if I turn my phone off or don't open my computer, nothing's changed. Obviously, the world has changed for me, but home looks and feels exactly the same.
For me, it's important to ask what are you making, and what's the public's relationship to that. And I say public relationship because I don't really care so much about any sort of reception.
It's interesting because all I want to do is make music. I want to sit in my room, play the guitar, make beats, sing... And I have never made less music than when being a musician became my job.
I reached a place where I wanted to make more music, but I didn't know what I wanted. So I stopped labeling music by genre and just got into a studio to be creative. Now I write whatever feels instinctive.
When I was little, my mum would take me to see the orchestra, tell me to close my eyes and think about the story the music was telling. I always spoke about colours. I'd talk about how purple the oboe was.
It's funny because, based on the music I was making before, if you'd asked me who was the one gatekeeper or influencer whom I'd want to hear my music, I don't think Pharrell would be the first person I'd pick.
I just didn't really know who I was, so I didn't really know what I sounded like. And so I did a lot of writing, and I studied abroad, and I fell in love, and, like... I got to be like any other college student.
The make-up and the costumes were me being scared. I needed to create a boundary between me and the audience. To project this bigger version of myself. Outwardly, it looked good, but inwardly, I began to feel horrible.
Something really intense happened to me during the 'SNL' performance. It felt like the person I was made to be faced the person I'm becoming. It was the first time I felt like I was able to make any sense of ownership of my work.
This job forces you to ask yourself so many questions: Do you want money? Do you want power? Do you just want to be good at your craft? I don't know what I'm doing. I just want to be happy. But I know I have to keep making music.
Everybody thinks that touring is really glamourous, but I pretty much sit in a room all day. I have a sort of office where I do emails, and I go for a run, and then at the end of the night, I go to bed. It's not like some crazy party.
I only get compared to women, which is crazy because often the women they compare me to... we just have a similar hairstyle. Whether it's Joni Mitchell or Florence and the Machine - our music doesn't always sound anything alike. But we just all have long hair.
When you're super passionate about something, you're more willing to do all of the grunt work. You know, like, I'm so willing to live on a bus for my whole life because that means I get that one moment on stage or that one moment in the studio that totally fills me.
Friends came on the road, came on tour, came in my music videos; I got in the studio with them. I'm a really loyal person, and I don't have a really large group of friends, but the people I hang out with I really, really care about, and they continue to be a part of my life.
There were a couple of months when I was approaching graduation where I started to think of graduating from college as the afterlife. Because it's this kind of crazy thing that you always know you're going to finish school inevitably, but nobody ever really tells you what happens afterwards.
The reality of the music industry is that I was a 22-year-old college graduate who was able to walk into boardrooms and be the one in charge. It's incredibly empowering. I wasn't ready - I definitely was not ready - but I was prepared as I possibly could have been because I had studied the music industry.
Part of success is having a good story, and as a journalist, I totally understand. But it meant that my many, many years of focus and hard work got kind of prepackaged into a Cinderella story. I'm super grateful that it happened, but it left me feeling like I never got to be a full human in the experience.