Alison Sudol

“I love doing free shows because then anyone can come.”

“I would love to show young girls that you can be complex, and that you don't have to part ways with your femininity in order to be taken seriously. But it does take more strength if you're going to be feminine, because people are going to underestimate you. I struggled with that when I was growing up.”

“Once one goal is checked off, you have to up the ante just to keep yourself sane.”

“It's different from music because music is like going deep down into soul, like scooping out all the difficult, beautiful, messy stuff and putting it into songs. Writing is more like playing for me.”

“The song 'Almost Lover' is very important to me, because when I wrote it, I threw everything away. That kind of set the bar as a writer, as a singer, as a person.”

“Whenever you meet another woman, you immediately revert to you five-year-old self thinking, 'do you want to be my friend. Can I keep you?'”

“I'm a terrible parallel parker.”

“I always try to scour local vintage shops and antique stores as much as I can while I'm on the road - it's my version of hunting for buried treasure.”

“I can be very pessimistic and very dark, but there is also a part of me that's very determinedly optimistic.”

“Besides a princess and a ballerina and a firefighter and a vet, I think I wanted to be an artist.”

“Even when my every inclination is to be otherwise, I don't want to live my life on the dark side of things. Sometimes that takes a little bit of effort, and when that's the case music is the way that I totally make sense of things.”

“I don't love my speaking voice, frequently - but I think that we need music, and when a person sings, those kind of vibrations go through your body, it's amplified in the room. It goes through everyone else's body, too.”

“I lived in Washington from when I was born to when I was 5.”

“I felt brave when I sang and could put into lyrics what I couldn't tell anybody else.”

“I do love to dance, and that's fun, but I will never stop writing my quiet, sensitive songs.”

“Pines' is a different kind of album for me. It was a different approach, everything about it, I just went at it as if I had never made a record before basically.”

“As a person life has always been a bit of a challenge for me and I have spent so much of my early years in fear and I think that making music makes me want to be more courageous.”