It's no longer unusual for real avant-garde composers to have been in a band, and for bands to be interested in a wide range of music. Look at how artists like Aphex Twin are influenced by Nancarrow and Stockhausen.
Amazingly, I've been sort of an anomaly in the music industry. I feel like I've been able to exist as kind of a throwback artist.
One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.
I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I never took music lessons. I was just playing around in front of the mirror and being silly, then suddenly I started making songs.
I'm not really a big Springsteen guy. I'll listen to the music, but ... I didn't really get attached to it as much as, like, country artists. That's really who I listen to.
Most artists have contracts directly with the record company, and when they do music, all of their music is owned by the record company. But I did mine through a production company.
Pop music seems to be the way radio programming has chosen to support female artists. They have chosen not to support a more provocative voice from women, which I find disappointing.
I am interested in things happening around me, and I need to understand what's going on in other artistic sectors like music and literature.
In this industry, all the heads of labels are men, but every artist has to prove themselves, regardless of their sex. I have always been very vocal about the women sticking together.
It was my mom and I against the world. We lived in New York in this bohemian lifestyle where an extended group of artists and photographers were like my aunts and uncles.
So it's hard to be an artist and be true to the reality of the world you want to create and also make it entertaining and successful financially.
I want to be an artist you cannot categorize at all. You can't put a box around me. You can't put anything around me.
I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade.
It's not fair to compare one artist to another because they all come with their own sort of elements to the picnic, you know.
I'd rather be eccentric and artistic, than be normal and have not one inch of art flowing through my heart.
Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time endlessly exposing them.
I'm focused now, definitely. I absolutely need to show everyone that I'm powerful and strong and can be graceful and artistic, too.
Before I became an actor, I was a visual artist, and I've always hankered for the storytelling behind the camera.
The way to judge a new artist is by listening to their albums and gauging the progress that they make from the first record to the next one.
I'm just an artist. I can only do so much. I can only say so much.
I'm trying to embrace social media because it gives artists a little more power than we've had in the past.
