Arca

“I feel like every record I've ever made, on some level, is urgent.”

“Hip-hop, at its best, is disruptive.”

“Making music is an inward and outward gesture at once. I make it because I'm communing with a side of myself that might help me look people in the eye. But at the same time, I'm reaching out, in a way.”

“I've come to the conclusion that the best way for me to grow is in a very self-forgiving way: to take a risk and, in response to how a record pans out, take a risk in the opposite charge.”

“Arthur Russell is very important to me on many levels, and when I read Tim Lawrence's biography on him, 'Hold on to Your Dreams,' one of the things I took away was: first thought, best thought. I live by that when I make my own music.”

“With 'Lonely Thug,' I constructed a fantasy character who was very masculine and strong and almost threatening, but his demeanor belied some complication.”

“Once you share what you're communicating with your audience, then you can make more sense of it in a subconscious way.”

“I like contradictions, and I like exceptions. I don't like rules and dogma.”

“It's very human to try to put things into boxes, and it's hard for us to reconcile with grey areas, and yet somehow, that's the area I find the most poetic, the juiciest.”

“We try and banish whole inner realms. Sometimes, you have to touch the thing inside you're most afraid of and see what happens when you touch it rather than look away from it all the time.”

“With song titles, I try to keep a healthy sense of humor while saying something at the same time.”

“If I gravitate toward someone, I bridge the gap between us somehow, and I accidentally maybe start seeing the world through their eyes.”

“I've learned to use things like softness and vulnerability as weapons against the things you feel ashamed of in yourself.”

“When I was young, I put on performances for my family and my parents where I would dance like a woman, singing a really exaggerated woman's vocal in front of my whole family.”

“Speaking two languages fluently makes each language not so important.”

“The only thing that mattered to me with 'Xen' was setting things up against each other in an uncomfortable way. If there's a really soft piece of music, and then you're hit by a painful explosive sound, your brain does this funny somersault trying to make sense of why this happened. And at that very moment, your brain is malleable.”

“When I was about 13, and I would write in my journal, I'd be like, 'I just watched 'Spice World,' the Spice Girls movie, and I loved it.' Sometimes I would sign them with the name Xen.”

“It's a really deep and layered psychological situation - making music with someone - if they're trying to make something real and personal. It's almost like dating: you allow yourself to be consumed by the other - not in a bad way, but in a way that happens in nature.”

“I think, with every kind of creature and every kind of human, there is no better. We're all just mutations, and I think that each mutation should be celebrated.”

“'Xen,' to me, was a necessary excursion inward, into myself. 'Mutant' is a response to it and is more extroverted.”