Femininity can be put into so many different categories. Especially as an artist. I think I have like a lot of different genres and it's sometimes hard to pin down exactly what genre it is that I do, but I've always seen myself as a guitar music person. But in guitar music when I was growing up, the only women who were really able to break through into anything resembling the mainstream were generally very androgynous and thin, very bogey and kind of fragile. Kind of a Joan Didion pay-off. I remember when Joan Didion died, everyone really praised her restraint. She was so committed to her work. You know, she'd wake up at 9am every morning, come down with a big pair of sunglasses on, a handful of salted almonds and drink like three Diet Cokes before she started doing her work, and she'd work every single day. And I feel like that was always the only acceptable woman in music. Someone who was like very restrained, and androgynous or very fragile and quiet and delicate.
I guess you just started to have people break out of that. The best example I have of this is Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters. She had always been quite demure and careful with her presentation, and then she released this album. And it’s girly in its build up, in its sound, and in the way that presented it. But it's also angry and very, very loud. She screams about being r*ped and stuff. A great album. On the one hand, she got 10 out of 10 on Pitchfork, but other people were like, how could she do this?
And for me, that's just been something that's followed me around as well. You know, I'm like, a slightly bigger girl. I don't think I hit any of the marks of like the classical BMT standard that has been laid out. I mean, which of us does? But the few people that do seem to end up going into that stratospheric pop range. Whenever one of my videos hits the main page of TikTok I get awful comments. People just being like, ‘This music sounds terrible. Why is she singing like that? She looks like Chucky’. I get Chucky a lot, because I have short ginger hair. I'm really great, and really objectively fun to listen to. But there's a lot of people who will just probably refuse to listen to my music because of the way that I've presented it, which is myself. I think culture is still against women and queer people.