Bat for Lashes Quotes
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I want to add something worthwhile rather than just chucking loads of stuff into the world. I don't want to feel responsible for adding to the soup of mediocrity.
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I was a nursery school teacher, and I worked with youth groups. I loved that job. It was exhausting, but you got a lot back - all their purity and insight and innocence is so on the surface, and they're so unrepressed; they'd really scream at you and then give you a massive kiss.
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It can be frightening to turn your back on what others think is right. But I'm not the same as a lot of people - I'm quite artistic and quite eccentric sometimes. If you honour that, you fit into yourself better - and people accept you for what you are.
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I feel empathy for people who are trapped in a prison of self-consciousness in an uncomfortable way. We can be free, but we're so held back. So perhaps that's why I feel a duty to make my work. I feel liberated when I'm doing it, and I want other people to feel liberated through it.
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There's this label called Neurotica by these sweet girls that have given me some lovely things to wear, and we might collaborate on making a little piece. They're really lovely, and I think they've been quite inspired by me in turn.
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An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos are ways of adding more dimensions to the words and music. I like to be involved in all of it because it's all of a piece.
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Mum says that, since I was a tiny baby, I've had the most strong-willed and stubborn personality known to man. Although that was a real pain for her, she admired my resolve.
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We are bits of energy floating about in various guises, and when we die we rejoin the big cosmic soup of the universe.
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When I finished touring 'Fur and Gold,' I was just like, 'What am I doing? What do I have? Where is my home?' I didn't really know where it was, so I went to New York to try and make it there.
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When I was young, I wanted to be a writer or painter. I was always writing stories, and I excelled at drawing. My teachers encouraged my art work. When I was 9 or 10, I began learning piano and started writing music.
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There's something in me that loves to inspire people: when I'm playing music, I imagine all this sparkly stardust going through everyone. I want to make people come alive.
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I get invited to premieres, and I've been to a few fashion shows and stuff, but I always get really bored. I feel quite awkward. You have to wear something by them, and it all feels like, 'Why am I doing free advertising for you?'
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I live in a Moomin house in East London which I fill with blankets and nice crockery and get people round for dinner. When you travel a lot, you feel rootless and adrift - this is my sanctuary, where I can breathe out.
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I find the world pretty overwhelming, so I'm getting into meditation and doing lots of yoga. And I love my garden, and I love nature, and I feel like that grounds me and keeps my mind clear.
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I think Deborah Harry has a really sexy, cool and quite playful sex-kitten kind of style I really like.
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Mentorship is really important. I really like to talk to people who have been in the music industry much longer than me about artists' block, things I'm struggling with, or the music business. It's really important for artists to have a community. Sometimes you can feel quite isolated.
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I got really good input up until the age of 11, which is perfect. That's when adolescence starts, when I would have really wanted to rebel. Up until that point, though, it didn't feel like doctrine, and it gave me a great moral structure.
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In the music industry, intelligence in women is undervalued.
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There's a part of me that wishes I could go out in T-shirt and jeans, 'cause I really love Patti Smith, Cat Power, girls who look so casual; that appeals to me 'cause I guess it's the opposite from what I do. But I can never let myself just do that - I always have to try and dress up and create something.
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I like it when people make an effort to wear things that you wouldn't normally put together - I like eccentrics.
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All of the art that I love is about peeling back layers and delving into something that's in a subconscious or dream realm. People like Jan Svankmajer, or the artist Yoshimoto Nara, or David Lynch.
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The record company doesn't know what to do with me, because I'm not a Lily Allen, but I'm not really an indie artist, either. All the best artists have been in the middle.
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When I was little, I grew up in a place called Hertfordshire, which is just near London, but out in the country, and I visited Pakistan in the summers to go and see my family on my dad's side.
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David Bowie worked with Brian Eno and dressed up in extraordinary clothes, but he was also a brilliant songwriter who captured the thoughts of a generation. He was hugely successful, without compromise.