When you're uncomfortable, that's when you learn something new about yourself.
With 'Lonely Thug,' I constructed a fantasy character who was very masculine and strong and almost threatening, but his demeanor belied some complication.
Arca means 'box' or 'wooden' in very old Spanish. It's a ceremonial container where you store jewelry or valuables, an empty space that can become pregnant with whatever music or meaning I give to it.
Arthur Russell is very important to me on many levels, and when I read Tim Lawrence's biography on him, 'Hold on to Your Dreams,' one of the things I took away was: first thought, best thought. I live by that when I make my own music.
When I was younger, I used to say, 'I'm not making music. I am getting catharsis for emotion.' For me, vulnerability is an act of uncovering. It's a revealing: the idea of putting aside your armour and allowing pain to enter.
We try and banish whole inner realms. Sometimes, you have to touch the thing inside you're most afraid of and see what happens when you touch it rather than look away from it all the time.
Internally, we have so many different parts, both positive and negative. And if you force them together, a spark comes out.
I've learned to use things like softness and vulnerability as weapons against the things you feel ashamed of in yourself.
When I met Bjork, I felt like it was a friendship first; it was like an oxygen you get from a person you only can exist with symbiotically. It's one of the most beautiful relationships I've had. She is incredible.
I think for the longest time I used to be kind of embarrassed that if I hung out with someone that had a really, really strong personality, I would end up accidentally catching myself talking like them.
Compulsion is a behaviour that short-circuits you out of feeling ashamed, and then you feel triple-ashamed afterwards.
That's been a huge recurring thing in growing up - allowing two things to exist in the same space even though, instinctively, they might not be designated to.
It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow, that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.
Being knee-deep in sadness or suffering and refusing to look down - to me, that represents something more powerful than someone who's never gone through difficulty.
When I was young, I put on performances for my family and my parents where I would dance like a woman, singing a really exaggerated woman's vocal in front of my whole family.
When I was making 'Xen,' I was surprised at how introverted some of the songs were. I wasn't deliberately trying to go quieter, but I had to embrace it.
I knew that I would have to leave Venezuela in order to figure out who I was.
I guess all of us have a little bit of both masculinity and femininity, and bridging the gap between those two things is really fertile.
I think, with every kind of creature and every kind of human, there is no better. We're all just mutations, and I think that each mutation should be celebrated.
The only thing that mattered to me with 'Xen' was setting things up against each other in an uncomfortable way. If there's a really soft piece of music, and then you're hit by a painful explosive sound, your brain does this funny somersault trying to make sense of why this happened. And at that very moment, your brain is malleable.
