Alison Sudol

I love watching people.

I did a couple auditions, failed miserably, was about to give up, and booked 'Transparent.'

My parents were acting teachers, but I was a bookworm who was passionate about music.

Because I grew up around the reality and heartbreak of acting, I didn't want to have anything to do with it.

When you're vulnerable and lost and then suddenly somebody is kind to you and gives you love and gives you tenderness and takes care of you in some way, that creates a huge indebtedness. From there, the likelihood that you're going to follow them anywhere is much higher.

Whenever you meet another woman, you immediately revert to you five-year-old self thinking, 'do you want to be my friend. Can I keep you?'

I look to films to learn and to see different avenues that you can take in growing up.

I don't love my speaking voice, frequently - but I think that we need music, and when a person sings, those kind of vibrations go through your body, it's amplified in the room. It goes through everyone else's body, too.

Percussion is so good for me!

Fear seems like it's this physical thing - some monster - but it's just energy.

Singing has an impact on the human body.

I want to have a long career, so I'm fine with it growing slowly.

I felt brave when I sang and could put into lyrics what I couldn't tell anybody else.

In L.A. you can be quite isolated, but in London you can ride the Tube and are right in the thick of humanity and every type of person that you can imagine is passing by.

I felt I had to choose between being pretty or smart or athletic, and stick to it because if you try to do more than one, you have nowhere to belong. Then music was a boy's world and a lot of times men assumed I didn't know what I was doing because I was young and female.

I would love to show young girls that you can be complex, and that you don't have to part ways with your femininity in order to be taken seriously. But it does take more strength if you're going to be feminine, because people are going to underestimate you. I struggled with that when I was growing up.

Women are often written as one thing - the ingenue or the vamp - but real women are many things.

There are so many things I've done that I'm glad I've done privately because it's so embarrassing just anyway.

I'm just really not good at being like anybody else or writing like anybody else.

The song 'Almost Lover' is very important to me, because when I wrote it, I threw everything away. That kind of set the bar as a writer, as a singer, as a person.

Especially growing up in Los Angeles, there's just a very different mind-set than my own. There's no 'Romeo and Juliet' in Los Angeles. There's 'Laguna Beach.'

I firmly believe in real-life fairy tales.

I want to go into the margins, into those moments where there's snot hanging out of your nose and things aren't cute and you're not pretty. I'm all for messy. That's what I want to explore.

Both with songwriting and playing a role, you're delivering the truth of something in a moment. In a lot of ways, it's the same thing.

It's different from music because music is like going deep down into soul, like scooping out all the difficult, beautiful, messy stuff and putting it into songs. Writing is more like playing for me.

I think everyone has their own path.

I think I've seen 'Sleepless in Seattle' like 40 times... I've seen 'Harold and Maude' like 50 times probably.

If you're going to learn how to ride a bike as an adult, do it somewhere where there's no people in the middle of the countryside. Don't do it where people are born on bikes basically.

To me, the making of art and experiences around that are the biggest part to me.

With music, every decision you make is a reflection on who you are - I'll obsess over the color palette for a record and the promo materials. With acting, it's not just your ideas. You're one part of a working machine.

Whatever you're doing, you have to do it 100 percent; you have to be totally present.

I don't like to yell.

I was worried that acting would somehow ruin any credibility I had as a musician.

I was so afraid of being lumped into this category of female actresses trying to sing.

I was a teenager with a lot of strangeness in me that I didn't know how to express. I was trying hard on the outside to be very normal and fit in, but inside I was a big weirdo. Thank God that little weirdo persisted, otherwise I would be so sad.

My heart gets tight and it's almost like my soul gets congested if I'm not making music.

I've had a lot of experience with not allowing myself to experience certain emotions, like anger and confidence, and with acting you're in this space where it's safe to fully go there.

Singing in front of people, I learned a lot more about fragility and strength.

I want you to feel in 'Riversong' like you're floating down a river on your back, and you're looking at the stars, and everything is incredibly still and peaceful.

Los Angeles has got its own distinct feel, and it's very contrary to the music that I write and the pictures I see in my head: no evergreens, no fog, no rain days.

I lived in Washington from when I was born to when I was 5.

I think you can do a lot with lyrics and melody.

I have an affinity for a lot of things that are kind of fairy-tale-ish and bookish.

Even when my every inclination is to be otherwise, I don't want to live my life on the dark side of things. Sometimes that takes a little bit of effort, and when that's the case music is the way that I totally make sense of things.

I can be very pessimistic and very dark, but there is also a part of me that's very determinedly optimistic.

I'm, like, the most insane Wes Anderson fan - his films are pretty much my inner landscapes. I just love him to pieces.

It's hard to constantly delve into your psyche and unearth these deep and often painful feelings and hold them out in front of people and say, 'Here's the most vulnerable part of me.'

I found movies to be such a beautiful escape.

In my mind, I'm still that kid who gets affected by other people's music.

I always try to scour local vintage shops and antique stores as much as I can while I'm on the road - it's my version of hunting for buried treasure.