The grapevine should be named after a more bitter fruit. It should be called the grapefruit tree.
We are blessed and sustained by what is not said
My voice in combination with the harp - which, by the way, I use because I've played it my entire life, not to make some statement about the harp - somehow has. . . coloured people's interpretations of the music and projected an idea of childlike or fairytale quality or innocence. Which sometimes prevents people from listening to the songs the way I would like them to be listened to.
The very first Walnut Whales recording was recorded just a few weeks after I had started singing, out of the blue, started singing. And the voice, you can hear how uncomfortable I am with it, and how terrified I am with it.
Families of privilege and money would have harps in their parlors, and their cultured daughters would learn to play. It's got such a strange history. But that wasn't the context that I learned it in, so the inherent friction between that history and the more humanist folk-y history wasn't in my conscience at all.
I never thought people would be mortally offended by the sounds I was making.
I don't look at people's expressions, because I still get nervous when I play, especially when I first put the harp up there. I just try to tune - it takes me a half-hour to tune, and I get nervous if I look at anybody when I do it.
I'd rather be relevant than cool.
The English are worried about the Euro being brought in because of loss of national identity and rising prices. In Scotland, people are just worried in case they have to close Poundstretcher.
I think that people assumed I was white because of my last name. My father is Caucasian, my mother is Hispanic. But English was my second language, believe it or not.
Art is socialism but life is capitalism.