Mitski

On tour, I don't drink, because I don't think in any other job you are supposed to get to work and drink whisky.

I wanted to take up guitar because playing piano is a little harder. Carrying a keyboard around is harder, and finding a real piano is much harder, and I wanted to play live more, so I figured a guitar would be easier to carry around.

It would actually feel forced or unnatural to try to do a different singing style or to try to change my sound completely.

I was a film major because, for some reason, I thought that that was a creative job that had more job opportunities. I don't know what logic I was following, but that was my impression at the time.

I don't think I have the kind of creativity to write fiction.

I think music is supposed to be shared.

You can be heartbroken about a relationship but also, from it, realize you are you, and you're okay with who you are or where you came from.

I really like The Cars. They're just so over the top and super pop, but I don't feel guilty. I'm proud of all the music I listen to.

I guess you can say I 'do the Twist.' I like playful dance moves that aren't too serious.

On one hand, I think it's very important to talk about race and talk about gender, because if it's not talked about, then we won't progress. What I have a problem with is when it becomes another form of tokenization, of shrinking me into a symbol instead of a multilayered, female Asian artist.

I hope to be a writer and musician my whole life, fingers crossed.

When someone is a musician - trying to make a living off being a public figure - it's really easy for people to see me as a face on a screen that doesn't have a personal life.

I'd always been fascinated by death, which sounds so morbid. Especially being a woman trying to make music, I think there's a sense that you're never young enough, or your career is going to end soon.

I have this thing about being acknowledged and accepted by institutions.

As a woman of color, I always have to be at 150 percent and better than everybody in the room to be considered competent.

Honestly, in the music business, it's all about being cool or being the newest thing or being the 'It' person, and I've tried really hard to be what is expected of me or what would be advantageous to my career, and I just reached the point where I said, 'No, I'm an emotional loser. I can't pretend to not care.'

What's important to me is that my songs can exist without any material anything. It's very reflective of my ideology.

I feel like I've always wanted to live in one place and stay in one place, but I always end up choosing things that make me travel.

I have my privileges, but I do feel like at every turn there is such resistance. Things seem to take so much longer for me to do. I have to say things 10 times instead of once. I have to knock on 10 different doors instead of two. For everything. All the time. I feel like I'm not taken seriously.

On tour, people know that if they ever ask me what I want to eat, I will always say Asian food. I'm becoming a stereotype, but it's what I want to eat. I want to eat rice.

Tour isn't good for writing, but it's good for inspiration.

I think the pressure gets to me when I play shows and there's more people in the audience than I'm used to.

When I record, it's this very precious and insular thing.

I don't want to be a musician's musician. I want to be an everyone's musician.

I couldn't wait to get out of school, but once I did, I didn't actually know what I wanted to do with myself. I don't really know how it happened, but I just started writing music and realized that's what I wanted to do.

When you're young is the one time when you get to indulge in being morose and take yourself most seriously.

The whole 'grunge-girl' comparisons certainly are the easiest to pick out, and I appreciate that music journalists are rushed.

If I have a song where I hit some really high notes, I want to try to bring in equivalently low notes somewhere in there.

I can't read in a car, because I'll get sick. It's almost instant.

It's very tempting, when somebody says they like this about you, to want to do that over and over.

I try to be regimented and try to stay healthy and work out and eat properly and go to sleep. And not get too caught up in the industry in my regular life, so I can save all my expression and energy for my art.

I've stopped wanting a home, I think, because I've been on tour all my life, basically.

I was one of those girls people called 'intense.'

I think growing up the way I did has made me a lot more objective, and that's important in the process of writing and trying to look at subjective matter that way.

I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S. I didn't identify as that before I came here. People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.

Sometimes when I perform, and it's obvious the audience is just there to party, or if I feel a wall between me and the audience, I get existential about it.

I lived abroad most of my life in insular international communities.

In my first few years of being in New York, I had a major identity crisis because I'd never stayed in one place for so long.

Pop artists work really hard, and they might not work for the same things that indie artists do, but they're still musicians, and they're still making art.

I actually love the summer. When I went to Miami on tour, I was actually like, 'I love this place.'

I don't really listen to pop-country, but I like really, really old country that's closer to folk. Like Johnny Cash, who is considered country.

I hate that my opinions are gonna be on record... that my opinions of other artists are going to be on record.

I remember I took a music course in junior year of high school, and some girl brought in 'Teardrops On My Guitar,' and she was like, 'Isn't this song great?' And everyone was like, 'Who's Taylor Swift?' And now, every time I listen to Taylor Swift, I remember that moment.

My father was obsessed with folk music from around the world, and I think the countless artists who performed them are my biggest influences.

I think my real influences are out of my control, which are the things that entered my brain when I was a kid growing up.

Whenever I've tried to ingratiate myself to an existing community, I tend to give too much, to become whatever it is they want me to be. It's something I do automatically - I've learnt to immediately adapt.

I think it's our responsibility as artists to not only fight for our art but fight for the communities that are the reason we're able to continue making art, especially since, in Brooklyn's case, we as artists somehow made it 'cool' enough for the bigger money-making industries to start taking over.

With solo shows, you have complete control over the set list. If you feel like you want to do something different or do a new song, you can just work it in. You can talk to the audience or not talk to the audience. There's nothing that's set.

My personality's very obsessive-compulsive. I tend to fixate a lot.

I took a few piano lessons as a kid, but it didn't last; I just learned piano from doing it over and over on my own, because I didn't have many friends, and there was always a keyboard in the house.