I love singing - singing was basically kind of my passion before ventriloquism.
I don't really want to be known as just the puppet girl or just a singing ventriloquist. I want to be known as the performer, singer, ventriloquist, actress, Broadway star, all of it. I want do it all.
I think writing and singing go together, but I treat them as two separate careers because I write for others. If I'm writing for myself, I prefer to be with the producer. And then we can vibe out and throw ideas back and forth, and I'll basically let the producer play me a bunch of beats until I vibe with one.
Stuff like Buena Vista Social Club and Fela Kuti were quite a main thing to my childhood. As soon as I reached an age where I realized that Fela was singing in English, when I got past his accent, I loved the rawness of it, and the funk and the rhythm and the melody.
I always had a passion for writing, but I always visualized other artist singing my lyrics, I never visualized myself.
As a vocalist, I can scream, and I've got a really good singing voice, but I can't do the really heavy vocals.
Singing was my first love and I never even considered it after I started acting, but now I'm bringing it back into my life. I trained from the ages of 11 to 17. When I moved to New York and got into serious acting, I just kind of abandoned the whole singing thing. But when I grew up in Pennsylvania I went to voice lessons once a week.
I was always singing around my house, and my parents thought they should put me into voice lessons just for fun.
In high school, I started training, singing with choirs, and getting voice lessons and doing a lot of creative writing and decided that that's really what I wanted to pursue as a career, and that's what I was going to study.
It was such a wake-up call going to music school and being one among so many that are really good at singing.
The very first Walnut Whales recording was recorded just a few weeks after I had started singing, out of the blue, started singing. And the voice, you can hear how uncomfortable I am with it, and how terrified I am with it.
I get egotistical about things where I can do something well - for example, my singing. Most other things, I don't have the wherewithal to back it up.
Playing the violin and singing and whistling are just three different ways of making sound.
When I paint, I definitely live in the present, like someone in a shower whistling or singing.
I was onstage singing with Luke Bryan, and he started singing a song that we hadn't rehearsed. Both Luke and myself just winged it.
I grew up in a super suburban place where the mundane middle-class issues were similar to what Ray Davies was singing about. All the topics he was singing about were middle-class woes and humanitarian woes - human-being woes.
I wondered how people would take me being a country music singer. I thought about deviating from that and singing other things. But... it doesn't really make sense for me to try to be something that I'm not.
I'm singing in the rain, just singing in the rain; What a wonderful feeling, I'm happy again.
I was in 'Seussical,' and I was in a cage onstage in a purple yarn suit singing backup, and I was like: 'I've had it. I can't do this anymore.' I will say for the record that I did love the show, but I was like: 'I want to do something else. I need a little more.'
I never publicise in advance what I'm going to be singing because I never quite know until I start. I often change my mind halfway through. I sometimes throw in stuff about politics or Shakespeare or do songs in Yiddish.
