I'm not a very open person.

I watched my parents lose everything, from a house to birth certificates. We were homeless for about six months, then we stayed in Baltimore, and my parents got jobs.

When I was 4, I had a schedule. I was playing softball. My brother was playing football. My parents were teachers, and they'd owned businesses. We like to work hard. Work and then books. Books and then work. We just knew that we had to excel. It sounds militant, but trust me, it was fun.

I don't wish homelessness on anyone, especially when you come from where your parents work hard.

It's always interesting when you're doing things yourself - getting the lighting, getting everybody together. It's exciting.

When I was growing up, there was no one. There were very few black women in tech; there were very few black women in the fashion game. We didn't have our Grace Jones - Grace Jones was before my time. We didn't really have a lot of black women in electronic and punk who were celebrated in the same levels as, say, your big mega-superstars.

A lot of 'Blackheart' was me, literally in a dark room, confessing my sins; Poe was the influence for that album. But that melancholy has a hopefulness - in every Poe story, there is always a moral at the end.

I really got back to my New Orleans roots - my grandfather played with Fats Domino. We had to leave after Katrina, but I feel like, spiritually, I'm back there.

There's always going to be a fight between mainstream and underground because the mainstream is a very small bubble, and the underground scene is a very small bubble, and they both see themselves as secret societies. But I never saw it that way. I always thought music was open to all things.

I lived in the library with my grandmother as a child. I still love the smell of books; the library card is still my friend.

I'm okay with being the oddball.

I like being in charge. I like being able to control my own destiny and ideas.

I've had two platinum albums. I have worked with thousands of people. But the most rewarding feeling is to see people on Twitter say, 'Do you see what Dawn and them are doing? They are number one.' It's the most rewarding feeling because of all the tears, all the bad stuff, and the people that said I couldn't do it.

'Armor On' explains why I needed armor in the first place. Sonically, you'll hear this battle of, 'I love you, no I don't. I love you, I hate you.' That's what you'll feel. You see the story kind of fight against itself.

It's a lot of work being an indie artist, but it's worth it.

I don't really feel there's rules in my everyday wear. I kind of do whatever the hell I want to do.

Hair pieces and head dresses have always been something that's been part of my culture.

I promised myself that I wouldn't be afraid to be who I was when I chose to do this music thing.

I'm not mainstream. You gotta find me.

I always knew who I was, but everyone else wanted to me to be their 'idea' of the 'right' artist. At times, I even believed them.

There is a thing about women that needs to be understood. We don't sit well with being put in a certain place.

I did write more mainstream stuff with DK. But you could always tell the records that I wrote in contrast with everybody else's because the format was a bit different. The harmonies were used in a different type of way. Way more metaphors in the mix.

Songwriting was my own journey. I never fit in with structure in songwriting.

I started to write my own stories, like small novels, and those novels became poems, and after poems, they became lyrics, and song came from that.