Helen Craig Quotes

The reason I made my stage name Kali Uchis is because it's still me in the sense that, my dad called me 'Kali Uchis' my whole life. It's still something I've been called since I was a baby. It's still me.

The fabric of my life is under my skin; [but] it's definitely not something that comes up in a conscious way when I read material. I have an incredible relationship with my mom, so I'm fascinated by mothers who do not have that. But I've never done anything that resembled my life. People always jump to that conclusion, and I wish life were that simple, but it's not.

A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.

I've experienced love and ambition and desire in my life, but never in the same way as in a family.

'Nil By Mouth' was a bit autobiographical, but as I always pointed out at the time, that's not my dad.

I need some kind of emotional stake in it to write my lyrics, assuming that place. It might just be an emotion I understand but am not currently experiencing necessarily.

Trees Lounge is based on my own life. Both my parents like the movie. My father, of course, thinks it's a masterpiece.

Vincente understood all too well what was happening to Liza; he had gone through it 40 years earlier with my mother.

I can't remember a picture that has expressed black attitudes and personal relationships as vividly as we've done in 'Cadence.'

I'm inspired by my surroundings. That's why I create dresses or videos around simple everyday things! I also love playing with nostalgic things from my childhood like cartoons. I like my art to trigger some sort of memory from my viewers, something they can relate to.

I have always said, even before I ever did TV, that I have a very dramatic family.

Maybe family is an eternal subject for me.

There was Uncle Ken of mine about whom I wrote a lot of stories. I can always write stories about uncles and aunts and distant relatives. They have to be distant, though; otherwise, you'll be in trouble.

I was 3 years old and Mary Poppins [1964] made an impression on me that was seismic, apparently. I fell into some kind of total creative, imaginative rapture over that movie that propelled this industry of Mary Poppins drawings, plays, performances - just an obsessive, creative reaction to it.

You can't write a song out of thin air you have to feel and know what you are writing about.

I'm trying to paint a picture of what I have seen and what moved me, as well as I can. That's all.

I find that I end up liking songs if I really have an idea of something I wat to write about-some problem in my life or something I want to work through; if I don't have something like that at the root of the song, then I think I end up not caring about it as much. I gravitate towards some kind of concept or idea or situation that I want to write about. Very often I have to write, rewrite and come at it from an opposite angle...and I end up writing the opposite song that I thought I was going to write.

How many of the people I know - sons and daughters - have intricate abstract expressionist paintings of their mothers, created out of their own emotions, attitudes, hands. And how many have only Polaroid pictures of their fathers.

Don't give me songs, give me something to sing about!

My family life, my adoption - it could be related to the songs, but I think the songs are deeper than that. They're not just about this experience.

Sometimes, you can incorporate things that you've experienced in your life and use that. And, other times, you just know what that feeling of hurt, love, anger and depression is, and you do whatever it takes to get there in your mind, and use it to your advantage, whichever way it works best.

The artists that I love- whether painters or filmmakers- it's because something resonates in me because I've felt it.

I think Grace [Dunham] and I are always working from a personal place, and the fact that these were issues that we'd been talking about in our own families really clicked, but also Jason's [Benjamin] passion about it and his clear sense that this was going to be something emotional and remarkable to watch. It was very hard not get excited about it and want to help in any way we could.

Anything I've not experienced I do not look to for a subject. I have to feel it.

My job is to write songs that have emotional meaning to me.