Music has always been my constant, my salvation. It's cliche to write that, but it's true.

One of my earliest childhood memories is my father taking me in the evening to Samena Swim & Recreation Club in Bellevue.

I always find that nostalgia is sort of like memory without the pain. And that's why it feels so good to kind of bask in that, and I think it can be deceptively comforting.

I will say, as a woman, when you put a mustache on, you find out a lot of things about yourself.

With music, I get to a much darker place. Where I'm able to go with 'Portlandia' has a wider range, but also a brighter range.

Grief is sort of the allowance of feeling.

I think that there's so many versions of femininity, and in terms of gender as a binary construct, that seems to be being dismantled.

I think music took hold of me and captured my imagination at such a formative age that I ascribe a mysteriousness to it, and I exalt it and take it seriously in a way that I think has just permeated my life ever since. And I'm less interested in music that is novelty or jokey or ironic.

The game Rock Band has been haunting me like a bad ring tone. It gets stuck in my head and momentarily effaces all that I love about music.

I really don't know what to do when my life is not chaotic.

I think one of the scariest things about depression is that it exists along with the happiness and the joy, and it kind of plays with it and sucks the color from it.

I get mad at myself when I get news from Twitter before I get it from a regular news source. Then I'm off to a bad start: getting the second-hand, filtered experience all day long.

The Northwest, to make a generalization, is a fairly sensitive populace. Slightly self-conscious and very self-reflexive.

The hedonistic lifestyle is difficult to achieve when you're still carrying your own gear. Trust me that you don't feel glamorous with a 60-pound amp in your arms; it's a lot less sexy than toting a vodka gimlet and impossible to do in heels.

'Wii Music' elevates the scope of music video games by moving beyond commentary on what music is - as 'Rock Band' and 'Guitar Hero' do - to suggesting what it could be. Yet I'm still left wondering: Couldn't it be more?

The process of coming out, as much as other people want to couch it in terms of politics, it's a very personal journey.

Rock Band is more like Stairmaster than it is like rock 'n' roll - it's the same steps with different degrees of difficulty.

It's hard to beat the visceral high of playing live and creating something spontaneous.

With Rock Band, you can play along to Black Sabbath or Nirvana and possibly find new ways of appreciating their artistry by being allowed to perform parallel to it. Rock Band puts you inside the guts of a song.

For a while I had somebody that came to clean my house that turned out to be in a band that I really loved.

Well, in some ways I had sort of the opposite experience of other people that are sort of dreaming of being in a rock band. I was dreaming of like corporate lunches and just like, and I'm not really joking. Like the whole idea to me was really appealing.

It turns out I'm not very good at working with a traditional boss.

After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music. It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise.

It was writing about music for NPR - connecting with music fans and experiencing a sense of community - that made me want to write songs again. I began to feel I was in my head too much about music, too analytical.

I have no desire to play music unless I need music.

Chemistry cannot be manufactured or forced, so Wild Flag was not a sure thing, it was a 'maybe,' a 'possibility.' But after a handful of practice sessions, spread out over a period of months, I think we all realized that we could be greater than the sum of our parts.

Over the years, music put a weapon in my hand and words in my mouth, it backed me up and shielded me, it shook me and scared me and showed me the way; music opened me up to living and being and feeling.

To really be tortured by a song, it needs to be more than just something you don't like or don't get; it has to make your skin crawl by getting under it. Strangely, that last clause could describe provocative or daring music, as well.

I'll admit that I'm not quite certain how to sum up an entire year in music anymore; not when music has become so temporal, so specific and personal, as if we each have our own weather system and what we listen to is our individual forecast.

Rihanna has guts and she always seems to be singing from someplace honest, dark and fierce.

I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.

I'm pretty horrible at relationships and haven't been in many long-term ones. Leaving and moving on - returning to a familiar sense of self-reliance and autonomy - is what I know; that feeling is as comfortable and comforting as it might be for a different kind of person to stay.

I don't think I would live outside of the Northwest. I think the quality of life in Portland is really good. People move from intense, high-powered jobs, and move to Portland, work half as much and live twice as good.

With Sleater-Kinney, we did a lot of improvisation in our live shows, and even our process of songwriting involved bringing in disparate parts and putting them together to form something cohesive.

I think hip-hop does a very good job of infusing comedy and humor and wit into music, a lot more than other genres.

With Portlandia, I don't think our intention is always to find something funny. Sometimes the humor comes from taking something really seriously. We're okay with making somebody feel uncomfortable or uneasy.

There was a clarity to the Nineties. It was pre-9/11, before that anxiety kicked in that exists right now about the financial crisis or terrorism. We were all just going to move forward into the millennium and everything was always going to get better. Then, whoops, that didn't happen.

I feel like I came in comedy's side door, and still feel very fraudulent in many ways.

I think that half of us feel fraudulent in our lives anyway. There's that strange disconnect of not really knowing what we're doing sometimes, or why it matters. It's our existential crisis.

For film and television, it's interesting how fans feel that their particular ways of manifesting their affections are the correct ones. It's not just about being a fan, it's about how you perform your fandom. That's always been interesting to me.

I wrote so much about fandom and participation for NPR that I eventually realized my most fertile way of participating in music is to actually play it, at least in a way that made the most sense to me.

I was always drawn to performing. I took improv and acting classes during the summers and was involved in middle and high school plays. But when I discovered indie and punk music in high school, those things sort of took over.

I read a lot; fiction and non-fiction are the mediums I find most edifying and inspiring. I watch movies and listen to music and take lots and lots of walks. Nature is a nice reset button for me, it's how I get a lot of thinking done.

I am a horrible visual artist. I can't fix a car, sew, knit, cook, etc. Statistically, there is more I don't do than do.

I associate Taylor Swift with some pretty kinky stuff.

I've been trying to immerse myself in the narratives of other people. I try to not isolate myself as much. It is really hard. People that are sensitive, you just feel too porous sometimes. There's this inertia that sets in, and it's hard to get out of bed. I think knowing that other people go through it is really reassuring.

I love my friends, but I feel pretty autonomous.

I like to connect with people through my work. That's my favorite way - meetings of the minds, fans at a show. Those are nice mediated ways of hanging out.

When the band first started, it was so much about carving out some space for myself and our audience and our songs.

I felt like power meant that you had to be engaged in a certain kind of struggle by force of movement and battle - and that's very exhausting. Now, power is more about certainty and stillness and realizing that the infrastructures that we gather around and worship are the least powerful things.