I do sometimes feel like I function within an echo chamber and I'm just kind of preaching to the choir.
— Weyes Blood
I feel like women are so specific and special, that there's no point as a woman to emulate somebody. If you shoot for a masculine direction but be yourself, you're going to get something completely new, because your femininity will show up.
A lot of church music really inspired me. A lot of ancient music that's made for God. If you get really into the history of music, inevitably you're going to have to get into sacred religious music.
There's a lot of artists out there who are pretty big but don't write their songs, they just have a lifestyle brand. These are all things that I think are a great enemy to music.
A lot of my family members were performers, and my cousins are comedians and actresses. From a very young age, movies were really important. They were given a lot of value.
I had this instrument that I built in high school. It was a huge, six-foot-long stringed instrument, and I started playing with that amplified and singing through power electronic stuff. I played those shows, and it would blow the lid off of everybody, and everybody would flip out.
I've always had gender confusion. I had two older brothers, and I've been predominantly male influenced. I really always looked up to my dad, really always looked up to my brothers... I had a lot of male friends growing up. It didn't help that in my town, where I lived, there were no female musicians.
The only outlet in mainstream culture for classical and more experimental music to be heard is through movie soundtracks, and they're such a wonderful display of emotion. I think the guy that did that best is Stanley Kubrick, working with Wendy Carlos who is an electronic composer.
I find Trump to be like a parasite.
The concept of 'Bad Magic' is something that is incredibly intoxicating and magical but ultimately bad for you.
R. Murray Shcafer is a Canadian composer with a twist. Aside from writing incredibly ethereal music, he is also an acousitc ecologist, fighting for the sonic space on this planet to be beautiful - a rare and shamefully underrated cause.
We live in such an isolating time with technology and social media and I think that creates this feeling of having to connect, of having so many ways to connect but nothing's connecting.
I don't exclusively talk to people on social media; I don't meet people through Tinder. I try to keep it face-to-face, and to be aware if my phone is sucking me away from the rest of the world.
I really like Adam Curtis' 'Century of Self.' It's about how artists have failed the general public by being so exclusive, like being in an echo chamber. I was definitely more like that in my early twenties - my music was completely inaccessible.
It's important to me to not stay too confined to any specific sonic space. There is something really magical about straight folk music - it's not that I don't like it, it's just that I like so much music, I hear so many different things, and I want to try more. I don't want to be confined.
I am a ham, I like to joke around.
Absurdity is my favorite brand of humor because deep down inside, in our subconscious, it's all surrealism. It's all abstract. The world is the surrealism, the absurdity, the humor - it all just overlaps.
I want to help people and change the world.
My mom was obsessed with Joni Mitchell; I grew up listening to so much of her music. But it was never a prerogative to emulate her.
If you're an evil company who's casting minorities to be in your commercial to get the politically correct card, it's like putting a band-aid over a bigger problem. But I think it's an incredible start.
Enya is a very matriarchal musical force. Her music is very feminine and she layers her voice a lot. It leaks into my music secretly on the side. There's a lot of lush layers of my voice hiding in the cracks.
I think all human beings have a propensity to believe in things, and to have hope, and I think as a child especially you have a lot of hope and you believe in a lot of things, and your bedroom is a safe space and an imaginative space where you can escape and go off into wherever you want.
Seeing Wolf Eyes for the first time - I was fifteen. I had this crazy feeling that this my generation's Stooges. I got infected by that energy.
I'm always thinking about the bigger picture and always feeling so much for everybody else, and kind of experiencing the pain of the world, personally.
When I went through puberty I had a huge rebellion against movies. I was so upset with how they brainwashed me that I didn't watch movies for years.
I think art should stand in its own neutral place, because I think that's how reality always is - it's this duality of being both hopeless and also full of hope.
Lamantia is faith building, encouraging poetry in that it abstractly hugs you by finally capturing the inexpressible. It's an experience similar to relief, reading his poems.
Seven Words' is a wanderer's tale, a well-worn subgenre in the tradition of farewell songs. The tune itself is trying to evoke the familiar act of leaving somebody in order to save them, or continue seeking.
This record was kind of, like, innocent. It's called 'The Innocents.' So it's the concept of being young enough to not really understand the implications of your decisions and then kind of feeling the weight later and being, like, but I was innocent. Like, did I deserve this?
I feel like I was born to make music.
Everybody is their own galaxy, their own separate entity.
As a teenager, I really loved Catherine Ribeiro - extremely powerful, wild, improvisatory voice. I loved old psych-rock bands, and Michael Hurley, and Harry Nilsson. And then later on I discovered the famous European singer Demis Roussos, who used to be in Aphrodite's Child.
It took me a while to warm up to smartphones. I just reached a point where I was like, 'If I continue to be a luddite, I'm just going to fall so far behind and become really bitter.'
I'm a big fan of horror films, particularly 'Friday the 13th.' It's one of the only genres that weaves abstract experimental techniques into the mainstream; having to be spooky requires a little more creativity.
It came naturally to find out what I did best, which was to write songs and sing well.
My parents are musicians. I was listening to the radio and recording songs off the radio on cassette tapes and playing guitars and pianos. Just emotionally responding to music from a very young age.
In our culture the way women have been represented in American film had a pretty big impact on my self-esteem and I'm sure it did on a lot of other girls. I think they have a greater psychological impact that anybody's willing to talk about.
I like writing in total isolation like out in the woods somewhere.
The bedroom is an archetype. To me it stands for a lot of the silliness of our modern culture where the kind of things that we worship in our sacred spaces are based on media and movies because we don't really have much else in the way of myths, if that makes sense.
On 'Cardamom,' I had pretty much total control on all of the musical stuff, but I asked a friend of mine to take the picture for the cover, and I asked a friend of mine to draw the back.
I've always tried to create music the way Kubrick makes film, just kind of mimicking consciousness. He has a way of mimicking this greater power.
I think technology and smartphones created a huge paradigm shift that we can't fully comprehend, and I think in a lot of ways things are changing faster than we can really process.
I can't stay within the constructs of societal expectations.
I can't read Jodorowsky's Twitter every day, firstly because I can't go on Twitter every day, but secondly because homie is an intense excavator of the human soul.
I've always been on the periphery.
There's this kind of robust confidence that I had as a teenager that became really constricted and slowly, like, weighted down by sensory experience by the time I was in my mid-20s.
I have a lot of respect for people who really work on their life - they've got this great apartment and a good personality, they write the thank-you cards and bake birthday cakes. That's who I wish I was. When I see people cultivate their own life like that, I admire it.
Everybody is constantly putting themselves under a microscope in terms of their productivity and their financial success and this whole idea of 'Picture Me Better,' like picture me, you know, who I'm supposed to be versus, you know, just accepting who we all are.
Good singing is learning how to transmit learning musical information with your voice in a way that everybody can relate to. But as a woman you just get a lot of criticism because everyone sees you like a raw lump of clay that needs some help.
When I was a little kid, I was a huge fan of 'The Kids in the Hall.' They were like my boy band. I was obsessed with sketch comedy. Being raised Christian, I was somewhat sheltered from the more radical high-art world. So to me, comedy was where people got to express themselves in an abstract way. It was a big part of my growing up.
