I wear my personality on my sleeve, for sure, and my look is constantly changing because so am I.
The environment around you shapes who you are. How you handle an emergency or how you react when someone is rude to you, that's you.
I'm open about having bipolar disorder. I'm open about being of mixed race. I'm open about being bisexual, and I have this wantingness to talk about it, and for me, it's about more than being a role model for any specific community.
I'm a human, and I'm multidimensional. If I was the perfect form of anything, I'd be boring. If I was a free spirit all the time, I would be boring; I would lack depth. If I was dark and enigmatic all the time, then I would lack relatability.
Being bisexual, being bipolar, being biracial - it's been used to define me, but I am desperate to be indefinable.
It's hard because I think I fall into this in-between space where there's something that's innately feminine about me, and there's also something that's kind of androgynous. I carry myself somewhere in between, and I think my music lends itself to that as well.
My EP, 'Room 93,' was all about isolation - it was based on the idea of being in a hotel room and being totally alone with yourself or that other person.
I end up pleading my case to alternative programmers - you're telling me that my music is too dark for pop, too pop for alternative, and urban radio won't touch it - so we have a record that doesn't fit in. And what is more alternative than that?
I'm a fixer, unfortunately. I'm like, 'Oh, I can fix you.' But it's not just guys I'm dating anymore. It's this entire legion of young girls who tell me they need me to maintain any sort of sanity or peace.
Growing up in the suburbs, I used to listen to punk rock, Brand New, Taking Back Sunday. And no one from my high school listened to it.
My mom is awesome. She's really young. My mom is 40, and she raised me listening to Nirvana and Courtney Love and Coldplay, Gin Blossoms, The Cranberries, and stuff. Like, my early, early memories are of being a little kid running around in floral skirts and Doc Martens when I was, like, three.
I had a crazy life for a teenager. I lived in New Jersey, but I'd go to Vermont for three weeks, join a commune, take pictures with the guy I was dating, come back home, and post photos.
I love Quentin Tarantino; I love Harmony Korine, Larry Clarke.
Being a pop-leaning, female artist, you'd think that I'd have my record company breathing down my neck and trying to control everything I'm doing. Actually, they've just kind of let me take the wheel.
You don't know fear until it's 7 A.M. and freezing cold on live television, and you're not sure if Justin Bieber is going to kiss you or not.
You can tell if there's magic in something. When you start it, you want to finish it and you want it to be perfect. If you're not inspired, and you're working hard to pull inspiration from somewhere and make a song something it's not, then it's very contrived, and I don't like to write music that's contrived.
There are conspiracy theorists who think I was crafted in a boardroom. Because I'm so very relatable and so very topical and so very Tumblr.
I'm not going to present myself one way all the time just because it will make me sell best.
When I was in high school, I was a bad kid and a good student.
I love Kanye West. I think he's a visionary. He's one of those people for whom I separate his personality from his artistry.
