With music, the more I do it the more I am conscientious and respectful of the idea that songs will come and then tell you what they want to be.

I know that there's a lot of sexy mythology about the muse coming out and striking, and I believe that in the sense that I'll wake up with fully-formed melodies in my head. All I have to do then is catch them. But the other side of things is the putting it all together. It's work. I know that nobody wants to hear that , but you have to look at doing all this as work.

The thing about optimism is that it's not optimism unless things are kind of bad. Otherwise you're just a realist.

[on her recording 'Strange Mercy'] I switched up my writing process.I just wrote very simple songs on guitar - one voice and one guitar - with a hope that the songs would be more emotionally immediate and coming from the heart. Hopefully we'll just bring on the apocalypse.