random ani quotes

"My dad...he doesn't impose himself on anybody. He's very quiet and stoic. [My mother] is very flaming. She now lives with me in my house and I find it hard to talk to her. I left home young and made her into a hero. I always thought of her as being very independent, funny, and strong. Now I know more about her and there's a lot that scares me, that it might be in myself, because she's totally nuts."

"The house, when everyone lived together, was like one scary scene after another. So it was a good thing we all kind of went our seperate ways."

"I'm used to being independent and calling all the shots, so none of this is odd to me. I was pretty much on my own from the time i was a kid because in my family I was the one who wasn't in trouble. I was well adjusted, so I was easily overlooked. My mother and father afforded me a lot of independence and just assumed I would rise to the occasion. It was a really good way for me to be brought up - or not brought up, as the case may be - because i was always a very independent person, the stable one in a very fucked-up family... I was pretty fearless. I always had big balls. My parents instilled that kind of independence in me. And I was a happy kid even though I'm sure I shouldn't have been. That independence allowed me to deal with the fact that everything's always in a flux."

"I've seen MTV Unplugged, a bunch of guys sitting on stools acting as if they discovered something new by playing accoustic. But what's so big about going electric and turning your amp all the way up? I can get a lot more energy and power and emotion by not plugging in. I wanted claws to hit the strings harder, so i use plastic fingernails that I tape to my fingers to keep from bloodying myself."

"When I was 16, I played in a band. We didn't really have a name. We were kind of a house band at the Essex Street Pub. It's a place that holds like 20 people and it's in a nowhere neighborhood in Buffalo. I was the songwriter... I was like 'suck girl',"

"There were six or seven cowboys and one chick... I stood in the corner and played for an hour. When I finished, the woman started screaming and yelling and hooting. I remember the triumphant feeling I had when I left the bar, clutching my 20 bucks and knowing I'd won over a fan. I tought, 'Wow, somebody really heard something there. There is some value to what I'm doing.' It seemed like a small victory."

"I'm never alone these days, so the pattern that I've gotten into the last few years--touring is such a gauntlet, it's no longer meandering around in my car, you know, bumbling from couch to couch, having a couple of gigs a week like it used to be--I sort of just jot down little snatches of my thoughts, and that can go for months. I get to feeling very artistically constipated, you know, if I'm touring constantly. I have no room to develop my thoughts, or sort them out, or craft songs, or process what I'm thinking, so I just kind of spit out little bits. Then when I'm home for a few days, I just live inside my journal and try to make songs out of my ideas."

"The responsibility of birthing future generations rests on the shoulders of young women, and there are so many burdens that go along with that, and there's so much that a young woman faces and has to deal with that we're often on our own. And then to compound that with a fear for your life, with mortal fear, I think is just so terribly wrong. We can't see our way to actually trying to help young women in this journey, in this responsibility. Instead, we make it almost impossible."

"Well, I'm not a religious person myself. I'm an atheist. I think religion serves a lot of different purposes in people's lives, and I can recognize the value of that, you know, the value of ceremony, the value of community, or even just having a forum to get together and talk about ideas, about morals--that's a cool concept. But then, of course, institutional religions are so problematic."