I love coming of age stories that have struggle.
Prom has all the elements of a popular story. It reeks of all-Americanness, tension, drama. It has romance. Pretty dresses. Dancing. Limos. High school. Coming of age.
You know, your first album is about really amazing things. Your first album is always about coming of age, first love, first loss, usually you suffer a first loss of someone that you love to death, even, you know, really big life lessons, things you learn from your parents' divorce or from the travels that you took.
When I was coming of age, I remembered reading and studying the initial ideas within the feminist movement. There was this idea with my parents' generation that in order to find equality, a woman would need to behave like a man.
One of my favorite things, coming of age, reading comics, was these ideologies and these philosophies of these characters. Seeing those on the page really represented in amazing ways some of my favorite 'Batman' comics like 'The Killing Joke' or 'The Dark Knight Returns.'
I think that clearly it has an influence, to be coming of age during the punk rock era, to come from a difficult and sporadically violent background, to have been in and out of such chaos, I think it actually helps. But I don't know for sure.