Caroline Polachek

“I just started studying opera - very, very much as hobby - and for some reason I've been gravitating toward French composers, like a lot of Debussy and Faure. I find it a really sinuous and spooky language to sing in.”

“My stepfather is a baron. He has a castle in Belgium that's been in his family for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's not fancy; it's really sort of brimstone and dark. It's got a moat and a drawbridge.”

“As soon as we wrote the beat for 'Romeo,' I knew it was a running song. I was thinking about it in terms of the body. What do you want to do? It's not a song you want to dance to.”

“One of the goals we had when making 'Moth' was to have the vocals sound less treated and less processed than we'd ever had before, to just let them be exposed and very audible.”

“But I wanted the karaoke-style lyrics in our music videos for two reasons: first, cause nobody has lyric booklets anymore, and when I was growing up, lyric booklets were like little bibles. I want people to be able to access our lyrics without having to go to some gnarly website with banner ads.”

“A lot of the music comes out of that conflict of wanting this other thing and feeling guilty about wanting it, and then it guiding me somewhere despite my kicking and screaming.”

“I almost gave up on 'Door' so many times. I couldn't crack it. It started out as a simple song with just a chorus-verse-chorus. I felt like it needed to transform more.”

“Being a musician, there aren't that many ways for me to consciously use a more strategy, math-based part of my brain.”

“So, anyway, I think the format of love songs for me stopped becoming about people and started becoming about life.”

“The men's dance style in dancehall is territorial, but it's also flirtatious and it's also showing off strength by way of smooth movement that you can only do if you're really strong. It has so much attitude.”

“My mom wasn't thrilled about me being in a band, because she very correctly said she couldn't see any sort of stability in it.”

“'Ashes Of Love' has much more hot-blooded vocal than what PC Music is known for, and a much harder production than what I usually do, so I was fully prepared for people to hate it.”

“Many of the elements associated with storybook mythology and gothic aesthetics are actually not expressive.”

“I went to art school, and I studied drawing and video art, and I've always approached music so visually as a result that I found it really difficult in the past to kind of hand off music to another director, 'cause it just ends up being this kind of mid-zone where it's nobody's vision, really.”

“If you want to know what the DJ is playing, just ask. You don't have the right to stick your head in front of my screen as if you're an expert leaning over the shoulder of the apprentice.”

“Yes, when I come up with ideas on my own, it's almost always a melody, just as often an instrument or bassline as it is a vocal. But it is a single, linear, monophonic thing. Something you could hum or whistle.”

“I used to obsessively draw. I was really good at it.”

“One of my biggest Disney influences in terms of world-building on this record was a background painter named Eyvind Earle, who was working in the '50s. He would make hyper-modern shapes that were sharp retellings of pastoral themes.”

“Driving in Chicago wins over New York; people are so fast. It's almost like there's a subliminal street racing culture here. They drive like comic book characters.”

“I really like when the lyrics in the music have an interesting relationship between one another - where they contrast each other.”