Bat for Lashes Quotes

When I’m doing just music all the time, it can get really overwhelming. It’s always challenging to switch it up a bit. And just because you’re a musician, it doesn’t mean that music is your only creative outlet.

In the music industry, intelligence in women is undervalued.

I’ve hidden behind my hair more than clothes. Sometimes having long hair with a fringe is very useful when you don’t want to look at people. I used to have very short hair, but long hair is my thing – a black nocturnal shield.

We are bits of energy floating about in various guises, and when we die we rejoin the big cosmic soup of the universe.

I always think that the exceptional people are those who remain outsiders but still communicate on a grand scale. I think I want everyone to feel more free, and so I feel really claustrophobic on behalf of lots of people.

Mentorship is really important. I really like to talk to people who have been in the music industry much longer than me about artists’ block, things I’m struggling with, or the music business. It’s really important for artists to have a community. Sometimes you can feel quite isolated.

I quite like androgyny.

I could talk for ages about how women are amazing, but essentially we shouldn’t be manipulated by the media’s expectations of our bodies. I’d recommend every woman to read ‘Women Who Run with the Wolves’ – it’s about being in touch with your more wild, free and powerful side.

Each album takes two or two-and-a-half years to finish between recording and touring. It’s like being with an old boyfriend every single night watching the same things on TV. There is a world out there going on that I’m missing.

The creative part of your brain needs to be stimulated. Sometimes you get blocked in the thing you do, because there’s so much pressure to do it.

I find the world pretty overwhelming, so I’m getting into meditation and doing lots of yoga. And I love my garden, and I love nature, and I feel like that grounds me and keeps my mind clear.

When I was little, I grew up in a place called Hertfordshire, which is just near London, but out in the country, and I visited Pakistan in the summers to go and see my family on my dad’s side.

I’m not really frightened by experimenting – that’s the main thing. I really like mixing very old beautiful pieces that are from thrift shops or that have some historical value with quite new futuristic things.

There’s something in me that loves to inspire people: when I’m playing music, I imagine all this sparkly stardust going through everyone. I want to make people come alive.

When I was writing my dissertation, I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It’s about learning to repress a desire for instant gratification.

The first album I started out, I just did everything completely alone. I think it has to do with confidence. The more confidence you develop in your own sound, the more you can open up and alchemize that with other people, just set it free, and not feel challenged by that.

David Bowie worked with Brian Eno and dressed up in extraordinary clothes, but he was also a brilliant songwriter who captured the thoughts of a generation. He was hugely successful, without compromise.

There’s this label called Neurotica by these sweet girls that have given me some lovely things to wear, and we might collaborate on making a little piece. They’re really lovely, and I think they’ve been quite inspired by me in turn.

An album is a whole universe, and the recording studio is a three-dimensional kind of art space that I can fill with sound. Just as the album art and videos are ways of adding more dimensions to the words and music. I like to be involved in all of it because it’s all of a piece.

I usually speak with all my drummers so that I write my songs with them in mind, and we’ll have bass sounds, choir sounds, and then you can multi-task with all these orchestral sounds. Through the magic medium of technology, I can play all kinds of sounds – double bass and stuff.

I think Deborah Harry has a really sexy, cool and quite playful sex-kitten kind of style I really like.

I get invited to premieres, and I’ve been to a few fashion shows and stuff, but I always get really bored. I feel quite awkward. You have to wear something by them, and it all feels like, ‘Why am I doing free advertising for you?’

I don’t like to be too submissive in the way I dress. I like quite boyish things, so I hardly ever wear high heels.

In a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.

I have lots of clothes that I don’t wear because I’m bad for impulse buying. They sit in my cupboard looking forlorn, but if I haven’t worn something for a couple of months, I usually realise that it would be much better off in one of my friends’ wardrobes.

Dad was an amazing storyteller and illustrator, which he did in his spare time – very inspiring and dramatic.

I had Hallowe’en parties every year, as it was my birthday five days before. My parents would actually put prosthetic noses on, and my dad would wear a top-hat and tails, put on a fake curly moustache, and hold a pipe.

I was a nursery school teacher, and I worked with youth groups. I loved that job. It was exhausting, but you got a lot back – all their purity and insight and innocence is so on the surface, and they’re so unrepressed; they’d really scream at you and then give you a massive kiss.

I was brought up by the English side of my family, who are very repressed and working class. Absolutely lovely, but very English.

I like it when people make an effort to wear things that you wouldn’t normally put together – I like eccentrics.

I get people being frightened of me. One time I did this photo shoot where I had hairy armpits – I was really digging it, but they were like, ‘We’ll airbrush that out.’

I don’t think music is the first thing I turn to. For me, I think visual art is more the thing. Sometimes when I’ve been doing music for a while, I can’t really take any more in.

I think there’s a karmic purpose that souls make before they decide to come into people’s bodies and become someone’s parent, or become someone’s child. Maybe my dad disappearing was his way of giving me material with which to work, or a predisposition to feel heightened emotions.