As you know, I'm a black girl out of the projects of New York City, raised in a single parent home because my parents divorced very very young... welfare and homeless at four and then again at 16 and just not having the things or the necessary tools ...
I have a tape recorder, and I just sing into it. I like to write that way. Sometimes I'll just get melodic ideas, and then I'll go home and sit down and add the lyrics. Or sometimes I'll get a lyric idea that I love. Usually it's pretty combined. Usu...
For me, the Earth had always been a kind of a safe haven, you know, where I could go to work or be in my home or take my kids to school. But I realized it really wasn't that. It really is its own spaceship. And I had always been a space traveler.
In some ways, Israel has achieved a peace. There are fewer rockets being sent into Sderot, there are no rockets to speak of from the North, there has been very little terrorism from the West Bank. It's a kind of peace. I hope for a better and more en...
I'm not the kind of person who likes to shout out my personal issues from the rooftops, but with my bipolar becoming public, I hope fellow sufferers will know it's completely controllable. I hope I can help remove any stigma attached to it, and that ...
I'm Method trained. How is this character like me? What does she think of her mother? What does her mother think of her? It's like construction, and then, yes, you hope you're talented and that the universe aligns and captures the kind of laborer's w...
I have never been married. I don't know if I will ever marry, though I hope to. When I am asked why I have not married, I explain that my parents have been happily married for 42 years. The bar feels so very high for that kind of commitment.
If there's one thing I've learned from traveling, it's that it is definitely more important how you are than where you are. You can say, 'Oh, I hate X city, I hate that country, or I prefer this city,' but it's a little bit up to you to find some kin...
I think probably the qualities that I look for in a man are somewhat different than they were before I became a public person, but not that much different. I think that, sort of, the element of trust is certainly much bigger for me, but the other thi...
I think films about men are often about characters who don't want to express their feelings. You're supposed to kind of admire them for not expressing their feelings. And I feel that's a bit dull. Women's stories often have stronger emotional content...
To be straight, I was kind of a dork, and in order to fulfill the creative fires burning inside me, I participated vigorously as a Civil War re-enactor through most of my teenage years, traveling across the country to participate in large scale reena...
A big part of making music is the discovery aspect, is the surprise aspect. That's why I think I'll always love sampling. Because it involves combining the music fandom: collecting, searching, discovering music history, and artifacts of recording tha...
I really love the EMS Vocoder 2000, which is a pretty nice little box. You put one thing in one end and another in the other end, and you're able to change vocals by the sound and do a lot - it's just got a great sound. But the thing is, it's a bit c...
When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actual...
I was turning 20 during my first record. Those decade birthdays always kind of cause me, it seems, to reflect, look back, and then look forward. I just was closing this period of my life where I was living in a car and scrambling my whole life to the...
Mayors could never get away with the kind of nonsense that goes on in Washington. In our world, you either picked up the trash or you didn't. You either moved an abandoned car or you didn't. You either filled a pothole or you didn't. That's what we d...
I don't care why they love me, as long as they love me. I think people respect me because they feel like - I'm kind of like Christmas. I come back every year. You can't get rid of me. I just keep coming back.
Now, a lot of what we are doing right now, quite frankly, is because of what happened on Christmas. Many of the things were kind of in the works. We were already planning, for example, the purchase and deployment of advanced imaging technology. You c...
Kind 'Guardian' readers have been forwarding me round robin Christmas newsletters for years now: lengthy missives full of perfect children, exotic holidays, talented pets and endless, tedious detail. The notes that accompanied them revealed they had ...
I love my daughter, but she had me on couscous and fixed me pastas and made me eat oatmeal every morning and what else, turkey burgers, turkey bacon, and that kind of stuff. So she wants her dad to live a long time, and I do, too.
Most of the time, the lyrics are kind of like my secret messages to my friends or my boyfriend or my mom or my dad. I would never tell them that these songs are about them or which specific lyric is about somebody. Often, when I sit down to write a l...
