We don't get the Tony gift basket anymore. You used to get incredible swag - there was like $5,000 worth of stuff. I remember getting an MP3 player, gift certificates to restaurants, a three-year gym membership.
I think that certainly, whenever you have a new band, the first record always has a certain energy to it before you know what you're doing. I think some of the early Sonic Youth stuff was maybe like that.
I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
I thought it was possible that O.J. could have done something. It crossed my mind. I was thinking about the events of everything and going, Why did I hear that? I was going, No, it can't be, and just all that stuff was adding up.
Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor.
I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.
I remember telling the agent, 'I don't want to do anything but Broadway.' She was like, 'That's not really possible because there is not that much Broadway. So I'll send you out on TV and stuff like that.'
I edit things down, and I've got a massive dressing room in the country, and so all the things I'm not going to wear but don't want to get rid of go there. And all the stuff I want to get rid of goes to Oxfam.
You can get really left of centre influences in mainstream pop. Michael Jackson and Prince are some of the most progressive artists ever if you actually dissect their songs there's some crazy stuff going on.
I'm quite contradictory - a bit OCD, but quite untidy. I have piles of stuff everywhere, but they make sense to me. And I'll find the one thing in the room that's my boyfriend's, and complain about him leaving it out.
You know, when you're a producer, you're a bit of a lackey. You're just making cups of tea and making sure they've got newspaper, stuff like that.
Even though I'm in the industry and I act and all this stuff, I still suffer from self-esteem issues... from the way that I look or the way that I talk... just nitpicking at myself.
I like to do stuff for my brothers and sisters to appreciate because they look up to me, and for other kids around the world who want to get into acting or who just want to have somebody to look up to.
I'm not a photographer, so I didn't get into F-stops or ND filters or background, foreground, cross-light, all that stuff. But I was interested in the camera and the lenses. That's the world that I'm moving in, in terms of acting and giving a perform...
I have always had stuff on the Internet. Way back in the Myspace days, I had a lot of friends on Myspace. And it is just all about, like, networking - contacting people and showing people, like, your mind.
To do more of a concert thing, it takes so much preparation. You don't just show up and wing it. You're putting countless hours in the studio, not just to write and produce stuff, but to come up with edits and special things for the show.
I have help, but I'm very hands-on in everything I do. I do normal stuff, I'm a normal mother and I'm a very hardworking woman and I have hundreds of products and many businesses that I do.
I also have that desire to blurt stuff out, but I've learned I can't do that. Not when you realise the whole world is listening. That's why perhaps I look so uncomfortable in interviews at times.
I can't get into all that physical stuff of having to have flawless skin... Sometimes you see people and it looks like someone's got an eraser and made their face a little blurry - their traits seem to go out of focus.
Another thing that was unique about working on this stuff was that I was engineering it. I used many of the things I had learned while I was away from the band. It sort of vindicated my decision to leave in '87.
I do dumb stuff, like playing my favorite dumb Barry White song and lip-synching into the mirror so it looks like his voice is coming out of my mouth.
