To be a great artist, you need to know yourself as best as you possibly can. I live my life and delve into my own psyche. Its more about exploring how I feel rather than making pale imitations of something that came before. We are unique beings, and the way we look at things is our own.

Bat for Lashes

Categorized in : Way Artist Unique

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.

Bat for Lashes

want people thinking

I like to get dark sometimes and then come back out into the light.

Bat for Lashes

light dark sometimes

I think what I wanted to do was meet someone who knew more than me about songwriting structure and progressions and middle eights and things that more traditional writers write and I don't usually employ.

Bat for Lashes

progression writing thinking

When I use electronic beats and program things, there's something quite brain about that - you're feeling it in your body but it's like a puzzle you wanna solve, and it gets very detailed. I really enjoy that side of music.

Bat for Lashes

use brain feelings

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.

Bat for Lashes

clothes hair long

They say for every high high there must be a low low low low low

Bat for Lashes

lows

I think the best cure is to stop doing the thing that you think you should be doing and go and have a bit of fun in another medium, maybe other crazy things.

Bat for Lashes

crazy fun thinking

Exploring the different avenues and being open to synchronicity and crazy coincidences and little things happening is part of going on your journey to investigate - and the little jewels you might find along the way, my job is to bring those back home and put them on my album.

Bat for Lashes

crazy home jobs

I did gardening and cooking and drawing and reading to try take the pressure off the music - just being eclectic and putting the fun back in and bringing more innocence in again is really important.

Bat for Lashes

drawing reading fun

I'd love to win a Grammy! Not ambitious or anything. And just having a really lovely bunch of kids and a happy family life, would be good for me.

Bat for Lashes

lovely winning kids

Music's free and music's for everyone to enjoy and express and interpret. It transcends countries and times and decades.

Bat for Lashes

decades enjoy country

I find it really interesting that people are shocked by the raw, natural representation of a woman and a man's body. I guess it's subverting our expectations in terms of how we've come to expect women to present themselves when they're being naked. Also the woman's and the man's role is subverted in that image. You'd expect the man to be carrying the woman.

Bat for Lashes

expectations men interesting

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

Bat for Lashes

floating soup energy

I had Halloween 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.

Bat for Lashes

halloween dad party

I'd tell everyone to come in naked in full body paint.

Bat for Lashes

naked paint body

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

Bat for Lashes

lashes dramatic dad

It's very much to do with how I'm feeling ... I love to be experimental and use eclectic mismatched things and put them together to see what third entity is created! 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.

Bat for Lashes

historical-value feelings beautiful

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. And 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.

Bat for Lashes

artist expression desire

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.

Bat for Lashes

dress wear high way

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.'

Bat for Lashes

like me time people