Ask me my influences, I always talk about Bjork and Beck because they're independent voices in the music industry.

Everybody thinks that touring is really glamourous, but I pretty much sit in a room all day. I have a sort of office where I do emails, and I go for a run, and then at the end of the night, I go to bed. It's not like some crazy party.

Ask about music growing up, I'll tell you I grew up playing classical music, and I didn't grow up in a musical household.

Lyrically, I've always thought about albums as a record of a period of time.

For me, it's important to ask what are you making, and what's the public's relationship to that. And I say public relationship because I don't really care so much about any sort of reception.

It's interesting because all I want to do is make music. I want to sit in my room, play the guitar, make beats, sing... And I have never made less music than when being a musician became my job.

When I'm joking around, I'll say I'm a pop star, because it's silly.

What I love more than anything in the entire world is making music. It's what I studied in school.

I'm a private person. I am quiet.

I've never made R&B. I've never made gospel. I've never made hip-hop - I don't think I'm going to, but I just want to keep challenging myself.

The craziest thing is I didn't know I could sing like this - ever. My voice has changed, or I've grown into it, woken up.

The reality is my career started with a song that wasn't finished and a video I didn't know was going on the Internet. It happened so out of my control.

I know some artists who write every day, and for a while, I felt really guilty that I didn't.

It took me two years to write 'Fallingwater,' but it's one of my favorite pieces I've ever made, and it was worth waiting for.

I only get compared to women, which is crazy because often the women they compare me to... we just have a similar hairstyle. Whether it's Joni Mitchell or Florence and the Machine - our music doesn't always sound anything alike. But we just all have long hair.

I didn't decide on what college I was going to go to until the day I had to.

I'm kind of a funny writer because I write very sporadically.

I love being outside.

Musicians have been political literally since people were writing songs.

I love pop music. It's just fun, and it feels good, and it's easy.

I've always wanted to play violin.

Bjork - she wears really weird stuff, and it's amazing.

I like songs that you can have both the physical release and an emotional release.

I reached a place where I wanted to make more music, but I didn't know what I wanted. So I stopped labeling music by genre and just got into a studio to be creative. Now I write whatever feels instinctive.

In terms of my voice, I'm very clear about who I am as a person and what I think.

The Pharrell video cut my body and soul in half.

I listened to birds and crickets, looking for the ways that rhythm appears most naturally in the world. I listened to the Smithsonian's field recordings of pygmy choirs from Africa.

I never doubted the music.

The make-up and the costumes were me being scared. I needed to create a boundary between me and the audience. To project this bigger version of myself. Outwardly, it looked good, but inwardly, I began to feel horrible.

This job forces you to ask yourself so many questions: Do you want money? Do you want power? Do you just want to be good at your craft? I don't know what I'm doing. I just want to be happy. But I know I have to keep making music.

I've always had an instrument attached to my body.

I got the craziest crash course in rock n' roll that I could have ever dreamed of.

I think, as a musician, or even as a citizen of the world, I just want to be a part of something or feel connected to something bigger than myself.

People want to see a magical fairytale story, but the reality is that I spent a lot of time making music alone in my bedroom.

You go to school in New York because you want New York and the life that comes with it.

My goal really was to make pop music feel as human as possible.

I titled it 'Alaska' because the song sort of represents everything that happened in my life surrounding a hiking trip I took for a month in Alaska.

I studied abroad my junior year of college.

I've learned that I'm a lot stronger than I thought I was.

I always saw myself as this quiet, introspective, thoughtful person.

I didn't actually start playing the banjo until I was in high school.

There are a lot of things worse to be than the 'Pharrell girl.' I hope that'll wear off.

I really want to make a great record, like my 'Rumours' or 'Thriller.'

I kind of always get described as this, like, 'nature girl'... I've lived in New York for the last five years.

The reality of my life is it's about 25 percent music, and everything else I do is so I can get that 40 minutes later to go play. And it is unquestionably worth every second of it.

Music is the most amount of joy or good I can do in the world.

There were a couple of months when I was approaching graduation where I started to think of graduating from college as the afterlife. Because it's this kind of crazy thing that you always know you're going to finish school inevitably, but nobody ever really tells you what happens afterwards.

'Dog Years' is sort of my way of saying goodbye and 'see you soon' to my friends from college.

When someone said, 'Let's go to a club' in New York, it often meant heels and tight dresses and money.

I'm kind of a terrible musician. I'm a very functional musician. I play just about every instrument in a band setting, functionally. But I should not be taking solos.