I do this 'Walker shake.' You got to get knocked down many times, shake it off. Life is about ups and downs, and you got to keep standing up.
My body started to shut down. I got really, really ill. When you're starving yourself, you can't concentrate. I was like a walking zombie, like the walking dead. I was just consumed with what I would eat, what I wouldn't eat.
My brothers used to call me Bob. They'd laugh at me, and I didn't get it. I'm 13 years old at the time, and then one day my brother's friend says, 'You know what Bob stands for? 'Booty on back.' You're fat.' Like my butt was so big I could reach for my wallet over my shoulder. And I broke down.
Wallow too much in sensitivity and you can't deal with life, or the truth.
We can go on talking about racism and who treated whom badly, but what are you going to do about it? Are you going to wallow in that or are you going to create your own agenda?
In a consumer society, people wallow in things, fascinating, enjoyable things. If you define your value by the things you acquire and surround yourself with, being excluded is humiliating.
It's important to wallow and grieve when you have a health issue. I don't think you really get the best stuff out of life until you've had the worst stuff.
Don't sit there and wallow in woe-is-me stuff that happened in your past. Move forward. Face whatever you're afraid of. Or deal with it.
I like to travel in jeans because I don't want to wallow around in my suit, you know? They cost too much. Jeans are comfortable.
Music is made to be listened to, so you immediately have an issue where you're playing it in the background like wallpaper. Music doesn't want to behave like that.
In many, many parts of the world, being a female, you're really just wallpaper. If you take care to blend in, no one would think in a thousand years that you were doing anything suspicious.
There are designers who say, 'Oh! I see wallpaper and blue carpet.' I usually start by knocking down walls. 'You thought you just needed some new drapes? Well, guess what: That wall's gotta go.'
Ask any worker at Starbucks, Cosi, McDonald's or Walmart, 'How many jobs do you have?' and likely he or she will tell you: 'Two.' I know colleagues who've had breakfast at one store, and gone to lunch in another, only to find the same person waiting on them.
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'm somebody who has to physically experience an environment in order to know it as well as I would like to know it. I recognize this is impressionistic, not scientific. People say, 'You sound like Walt Whitman.' Well, I'll take that comparison.
Eventually, all of our impressions will be dead. That's one of my favorite things about Paul F. Tompkins' 'Dead Authors' podcast is to be able to do impressions of people you've never otherwise think to do or get to do. I did Walt Whitman on there, and that was really fun.
The waltz can be sad and at the same time uplifting. You have to see life from both sides, and the waltz encapsulates that. If you're in my audience you give yourself to me and the waltz will grab you.
It is a real piece of art if you can make a waltz sound like it is the easiest piece of music to play, because it's really not.
To be able to walk out the door when you come home from a job and wander into the garden to do a bit of watering gives you time to be creative in your mind.
It's good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that's better than you'd imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn't be as much fun.
