My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work.
I really believe guilt finds its way out of a person.
It was my angry, Dickensian novel, I suppose. It was cathartic - I expended a lot of frustration on that one.
I do these records. All of these ideas that I have, that I put out there, that inspire me to write, are a purging in a lot of ways. I have to expel them in order for myself to walk around and actually smile and be a regular, or a living, person.
I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.
The songs I was writing still had lyrics or sentiments that didn't match what I was feeling. It was old, negative energy coming out of me still, but it needed to all get out so I could trash those songs and put them in the bin. And then I was able to let the new songs out.
Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being possessed.
About one or two songs per record is me doing a little bloodletting.
I like a good cry every now and then. It releases something. There are times in my life when I'm meant to cry, but I don't actually cry. But then I can be walking down the street and it's been a few months, and things get on top of me - that's when I find myself crying.
It's a very proactive thing to be dealing with your darkness and getting it out of your system. So it doesn't have to be in your system.
As long as movies are depressing, life isn't.
So it's the unwinding of your nervous system. The corresponding experience to what winds you up comes out in your dreams. To write a song then, even one like Don't Bother Me, helps to get rid of some subconscious burden. Writing a song is like going to confession.
Emptying the ashtrays was very expressive of myself. i just lump everything in a great heap which i have labeled ‘the past,’ and having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, i am ready to continue.
I suppose a cry does us all good at times-clears the air as other rain does.
There's something about a catharsis that is very important.
Each organ is related to an emotion, and the lungs are related to grief. When you clear your lungs, you eliminate grief and sadness.
Laughing and crying, you know it's the same release.
I write it to get it out of me. I don't write it to remember it.
Theatricality - that's where you get catharsis. The Greeks went to see drama because they felt like this wasn't happening to them.
When I do music, I'm really getting the devil up off me.
I'm not this dark, twisted person. Yes, I have my demons and this is my way of exorcising them. It gets them out - and better out than in.
I think what I was unconsciously expressing in 'Black Rainbow' was a very abstract and metaphorical grief, in the way I had suppressed my grief about my mother dying. In retrospect I realise I started writing 'Mandy' as a sort of antidote to that, to sort of express those emotions, to purge that grief.
Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off.
With 'Guzaarish' I went through a catharsis.
I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.
