“I sat in front of that window right there and I watched my mom leave. Viggo was a month old. I was terrified. And I’m usually the kind of person that has my shit together. I was terrified. I think for the first time, I was facing a journey that I’d never been down before. ‘Oh my god, what am I going to do? I have a human being that I have to keep alive and I’m doing this by myself.’ I’m a single mom, but I made that choice. But also I didn’t realize what I was getting into.”
Read More“There are so many things I want to do as a person. And some of them are just dumb things. I want to watch all these shows, I have all these books I want to read. I’m a comic book lover, so I want to read comic books. There are constantly little things in the day that I want to do. I want to go hang out and have a drink and sit on the balcony of a bar. But there is work to be done. So there’s constantly a fight between being a person and being this artist that’s grinding and still trying to make it.”
Read More“There was an essay I was reading and Mary Oliver was quoted in it. It says, ‘One day you finally knew what you had to do and began.’ And for some reason, that really hit me. So when I came back [from the silent retreat] I thought, ‘I’m done. This is it.’ But I wasn’t. Three weeks later, I went to get some professional help.”
Read More“I’m not somebody that’s like, ‘Things are supposed to happen or there’s a higher power.’ I’m very much not that kind of person. But I do believe that [my] injury happened for a reason. And it’s because I wasn’t dealing with grief.”
Read More“It’s so funny you mention rules. We have an inside baseball joke about the rules as we see them. And the rules apply in all cases to what you’re saying about being professional and having standards. But also the rules in our world apply this way: If your dad—who I know very well—said to me, ‘I want to get back out of retirement and I need a place to record something.’ I’d say, ‘It’s yours.’ Or if someone is out of work and needs a guy to talk to, or a gal to talk to, needs some kind of advice, it’s done. That’s the rule. You play by that rule your whole life. Because people did that for me.”
Read More“I’ve been lucky to have great mentors and to be part of great teams and to not have had to face the kinds of harassment and the things that you read about. The kinds of things we’re seeing exposed every day right now. Especially in the sciences—everywhere really. I’ve been lucky in my career, but there’s the, ‘Oh you got that because you’re a woman and they needed more women.’ OK, buddy. Or ‘Your fellowship for women in science is discriminating against men.’ OK.
Other than those kinds of conversations, I’ve been really lucky and I continue to be lucky. To be part of the company I’m a part of [that] I know values diversity and is making really active changes and actively pushing back against the status quo. That’s really important.”
Read More“I’m a lot like my dad. I’m not very vulnerable. That’s mostly because I tend to be 1) A black man in America, and 2) I work in a field where I’m a black man in America and I have to be able to prove twice as hard that I’m right compared to whoever else might be in the room. Sex, race, gender, whatever, be damned. I’m learning now, that as much as I have a gift for empathy, I am a vault sometimes. So I'm trying harder to make space for myself and the people around me. Also new people. Because I want to be inspired. I think friction makes the work better. I like bumping up against other good minds, other good intellects, other good creativity, other expressions, other forms, other function. To do that though, you have to continue to be somehow open.”
Read More“Being in love is discovering a part of yourself through someone else. According to my husband, we have this agreement where we’re the only people we’ve ever loved, we have no past. [Laughter] And that kind of works for us. But the truth is any time you feel like, or I have—I won’t speak for everybody—I have felt like I was in love—and there’s all kinds of love too, right? There’s the friendship, there’s family. And let’s be real, even [with] family, there are people that you love and connect with more than others, right. But that always resonated or burned something within me because I was discovering something about myself in that person. I also think that when people break up it’s really that tragic. It’s because you’re breaking up with a part of yourself that you identified in someone. Whether it’s something you aspired to or even sometimes you’re attracted to the self-justification, the negativity. Relationships [can be] toxic. You don’t always fall in love with the people you’re supposed to fall in love with. But I think it’s because somebody mirrors something to you. Whether it’s the promise of it or the actuality of it, you see something reflect back.”
Read More"Art happens no matter what. If you are going to stifle music education, if you're going to try to keep black people from having music education, you're just going to fuck yourself later on. And Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar are going to fucking make you look like an asshole. And sound like an asshole when you question what they're doing on stage. I love that, I'm so entertained by that. But the white male, right now—with the #MeToo Movement, with Black Lives Matter, with our rampant inequality,—needs to have its own awakening. What happens when I think of Robin Williams, when I think of Chris Cornell, when I think of Scott Weiland, being white men, there are a couple steps I need to do to be a hero and it's not that hard. That takes nothing away from their beauty, but there are a lot of white men in despair because we've been sold this automatic thing that's becoming less automatic. The worst of us are having a horrible back lash to that. We have to admit that mens' lies have been fodder for rich men for millennia. We're told that we're the ones who... 'Oh there's some bad guys in a building at Nakatomi Plaza. You just need one guy with a gun and no shoes and the whole problem will be solved.' Great movie, but I grew up thinking, 'If I'm struggling, if my feet are bleeding, and if I persevere, I can do it all alone and I don't need any help. My vulnerability is only my own.' That whole thing is just a lie to get men to give up their lives or to give up their empathy or to hold on to the idea that they deserve everything eventually. We need to have a course correction on that."
Read More"I love nature and I grew up with so much access to it in a rural place in Vermont. Not just access, but that was more my home than inside. What I think about now, all the growth I've done, and learning about my nature, I think about the discoveries I made in the woods and I'm like, 'I was really learning about life then.' I remember my first moments of self-consciousness where I was standing—I remember it so distinctly—and just having this feeling like, 'Whoa! I'm me!' It was a period of a year where I kept being like, 'This is so weird. I'm a thing. And it's kind of awkward.' It's still happening now."
Read More"Being able to be vulnerable with my partner and open myself up, which is difficult for me, to be honest. It's really difficult to discuss certain things, to open myself up to criticism, to change in partnership with someone. That's a big part of love for us. Something, like I said, I struggle with, I'm not good at, but I need to commit to being better at it. It's something I'm not good at necessarily, but because I love my my wife, I'm willing to become better at it."
Read More“There’s that phrase, ‘If you love something, set it free.’ I think that’s a principle that’s really difficult for everyone. Myself included. But it is something that I come back to sometimes. If you love something, you’re not trying to possess it or control it. That being said, I do think a lot of people are afraid of love and afraid of being vulnerable. Personally I think of being 'in love' as being willing to be radically open and radically vulnerable. I don’t really know another way to be. I usually try to demonstrate that to a partner. Being honest and open and sharing your emotions and sharing your spaces and sharing power.”
Read More"I can dig in deep to what I'm doing, I can lose myself in this stuff, I can take those feelings and somehow make them into something visual. And that was important to me. Even if it didn't come out (as) what I was thinking, it was just everything coming out of me in a therapeutic way. And after a while I learned how to corral that when I started feeling better. It's like, OK, this is how I'm going to piece these puzzles together. I always think, 'Where would I be?' And it scares me thinking if I didn't have this outlet...I don't know where I'd be right now."
Read More"I've been in situations where I tried hard to make a relationship work, but it made me more unattractive. So that sometimes doesn't work. I feel like I've had a plethora of different kinds of relationships. Whether it just be a really really fun casual one or one where it was—the last person I dated, I was like, 'I'm probably going to marry this person.' And it didn't work out. She wanted a commitment sooner than later and I was down, but it was a long distance relationship. She wanted me to move to New York and I said that I totally will once my lease is up, but I think she was feeling some kind of pressure. She's a great lady. She was the greatest person I ever dated. I still regret it to this day."
Read More"Realizing in life, there’s racism that exists. There are all these different systems of oppression. And then realizing when you come to terms with—I remember when I was younger, way younger, I thought maybe some things were bad, but my personal belief is that we live in a system, multiple layers of systems that benefit a few. There’s elite and the rest of us. I had to come to terms with realizing that what I wanted to do in my life was to fight back against those systems or at least create conditions for people to thrive no matter who they are. This is what I want to do with my life. And committing to that and guiding my life in a way to do that."
Read More"There were some things I missed out on in some ways. My friends left for university and I was ready to do that, but I went into making a debut album. I knew with my heart it was what I wanted to do. It felt like a calling or a deeper purpose. But that idea of journeying with friends and going to university and having this tight group going through all these experiences together, it wasn't really something I had. I made new friends but a lot of them were a lot older than me and we got into music together, but I didn't have that same sisterhood feeling of, 'Yep, we went through college together.' But in saying that, you come to different maturities at different times of your life. I have that now in a really profound way. A really strong sense of female friends and male friends that I've made and shared so much with."
Read More"I was married to a man, to Frank, who I told you about, and I met Meredith. It was a moment that I had to tell him that I had fallen in love with a woman and maybe I was gay. I still don't know if that label works. I could really make myself start bawling right now. Being honest with him. It took me eight weeks to realize that's what I had to do. Tell him. Hurt him like that."
Read More"It's when your thoughts turn off up here and it becomes just a feeling. I've been in a love with a person, yes, and I've been in love with music, I've been in love with art. It doesn't need to be a person you can be in love with. It's when all your thoughts go away and it just becomes a feeling you can't even control at that point. It's also an act of...you're putting that thing beyond anything else. I don't think I could put in a 16-, 18-hour day and not be in love with what I do. Because at four in the morning, if you're still there, trying to figure it out, and you're just loving that moment, either you're a bit crazy or a bit in love."
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