Maybe this is controversial, but I feel a big topic in pop culture right now is this rise in plastic surgery in young girls, and, you know, skinny is in. What’s your response to that?
It hurts my heart because I feel so much for these girls [on] Instagram, TikTok ,where all that matters right now is being hot. And that is just the worst life path you could ever go down. So like, it hurts. When I meet young girls I’m like, “Fuck that. Learn how to write, learn how to do something, that’s the way out.” It’s super tragic.
And they’re 27 with their whole — it’s like, you’re never going to be as beautiful as this time when you think that you’re not even beautiful now. I don’t know, it breaks my heart.
After you’re done touring this record and doing everything you need to do around it, what do you want to focus your time on?
So many of my friends growing up, they had to struggle in their 20s into their 30s really figuring out what they want to do with their life and like, I just went, you know? Now, I’m gonna have to go into that completely not knowing what the next thing is. But that’s also life, we don’t know what tomorrow brings. So I wrote in my diary today, “be brave.” I don’t know. And that’s the thing when you finish an album, too, you don’t know what you’re going to make next. You have to stay in that not knowing. Which is like an abyss.
I hear you have a serious meditation practice. Can you tell me about it?
Yeah. So I met David Lynch after my second album and I was going through all of these feelings that are in this article, I just was so restless and uncomfortable and lonely, and I told him that. And then he’s like, “But why don’t you just meditate?” David Lynch has a transcendental meditation foundation, so he sent me to his person in New York and I learned to meditate. And that changed my life, saved my life. And then I’ve gone through phases of really intense transcendental meditation and then I moved into more yoga nidra, and now I do some type of guided somatic meditation every day. Even if it’s just nine minutes in a taxi or something.
Has that been your therapy?
Yeah, but the thing that is interesting about that, like the more I meditate, the more I stay in this realm… like because the whole point is to dissolve your ego and be nothing and just be in energy, I think the more I meditate, that’s why it’s almost pulling me out of this industry somehow. I’m so much more interested in something very pure and fluid.
You’re going on tour. What are you looking forward to on tour if anything?
Whenever I go on stage, I have an intention with the show, it’s almost like a theater show for me. I have to be completely present and I have to challenge myself as a performer. These last tours, I got more into physicality and the arc, storytelling, just really starting to get into [my] mastery really. I’ve done this for a while so it’s time to show off. I was feeling that, too, when I played Coachella. 20 years of doing this, there’s no shortcut for that.
It’s amazing that it can still feel challenging.
Oh it is, because I raise the bar every time and I make it more difficult for myself. I think times are different now because you can have a song on TikTok and be huge and you don’t have to schlep around in a bus for seven years. But there is something very beautiful about that schlepping around in the bus. The blood, sweat, and tears, and actual dedication and time too. It builds character. I’m at the point of my life where I really like that in other people too. I like things that have a lot of depth, character, age. I’m obsessed with Isabelle Huppert, the French actress, and she’s like 70. I find her so much more interesting than like a young person. We need more of that to look forward to.
