“The Singing Nun’s story is fucking insane. Will you please publish me saying ‘It’s fucking insane?’ No one ever publishes the word F anymore; can you do that? Is it allowed? That would be good, because her story is fucking insane.

“It started with listening to Françoise Hardy and I loved Françoise Hardy, but I read somewhere that she’s a super right-wing human now. Anyway, I was listening to Françoise Hardy and I was learning French at the time. I was obsessed with trying to sing in French, I went through this period where I was learning to sing Italian and French songs and I butchered them like hell, but I loved the exercise of language in songs. Then my friend Matt said to me, ‘You need to check out this woman called The Singing Nun.’

“We listened to the record all the way through and it was so good. It was so beautiful, light and happy, but sad also. At the time I was listening to Connie Converse and Molly Drake and I’ve been revisiting those musicians a lot lately, so I brought The Singing Nun up first, because they were artists I was listening to when I was living in Chicago.

“I didn’t hear about her story until later, but she had so much light in her and I thought her music was so beautiful. It’s tragic how she passed, but I think all she really wanted was to believe in herself and her connection with this person, to be with them and accepted by God with them. Finding that out was so beautiful, but sad too, that the world didn’t agree with that.

“I’m looking the lyrics up right now, the title is ‘Radish Feather?’ I don’t listen to everything with a complicated glance, with some sort of philosophical language every single time. Sometimes it’s just ‘Something about this track makes me happy', and also, I have to forgive people who listen to my own music and don’t really listen to the words. But someday, you wake up and you listen to the words, and you really, really hear them, you know? Maybe I’ll understand what the radish song is all about someday, that’s what I hope!”

“When I was in Chicago, I used to listen to a lot of jazz. The students at Northwestern University would play at this place The Hungry Brain every Sunday, and the bartender would always yell at the top of his lungs ‘Everyone, just shut the fuck up!’, because jazz was important to him, and this was a jazz club - so shut the fuck up, no talking. Honestly, you could only order a beer after each song, that was the rule.

“It was a wild place. I remember going there and it was very pretentious, but I’d always been pretentious as a child. I was trying to read Dostoevsky at sixteen and know nothing about it but try to understand it, I was that kind of human.

“I met this guy who loved music and his Uncle runs Honest Jon’s records with another guy who was a member of Blur. He introduced me to jazz and soul, he considered himself to be very cultural and he’s a teacher now, he’s a clever guy. We’d share music and talk and he would say ‘I like folk music and I like Fairport Convention, but have you ever considered listening to something like this?’ And it blew my mind away. I’ve always wondered what it is when you listen to jazz, or music that doesn’t have words, where you just have to pay attention to the tones of the music. I can’t help but wonder what the thoughts were that were such a nightmare in this song.

“Artie Shaw and that period of time is like a window in my life. Lying on the floor, listening to the record the whole way through and it not being in the present, it not being a new artist, but being so excited about by the things I was hearing that existed before now. The way that people cared about making art and music then was that you had to really care about every aspect of it, whereas now you can get away with so much - you can get away without caring about most of it.

“I take this back to my parents; they didn’t consider me to be a musician, not in a rude way, but I think they were worried about my livelihood, how I was going to make a living and how I was going to take care of myself. It wasn’t until I was on David Letterman that they understood I was a musician - it needed to be stamped with the approval of television.

“I thought that was so backwards and funny, but then I think about their era and how that was the only way that people really knew about musicians. There was no social media, people could call each other on the phone and there was the radio, but there was really no way to make advantage of the media for your message, you had to just have the message and share it.

“I love the music from that time because it wasn’t corrupted by that process and I love jazz, so that’s my explanation for Artie Shaw and his orchestra.”

“When I was living in Chicago, I went through a period of listening to jazz but I was also studying these two women, Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, who were Surrealists. I loved their friendship and their relationship to each other, they shared men and they shared experiences together. I’m sure it wasn’t pretty the entire time, but I loved reading about them, I was really inspired by them and also in turn I felt a strength in myself.

“Then one of my oldest friends Tyler sent this song to me and he said, ‘This song reminds me of your voice’. I was like, ‘That’s a huge compliment, because this fucking song rules’, and I obsessed over it. I bought a case of five of Mildred Bailey records, I haven’t been able to find it since I moved to Asheville actually, I might have left it somewhere.

“I love the sound of the brass on this song, it’s so beautifully captured, it’s so perfectly lush and perfectly atonal at the same time. I really, really like that push behind the song and then there’s the words, obviously. I love her voice and her other versions of songs are incredible too, but “My Reverie” was the beginning point.

“I used to play it a lot with LeRoy Bach and my boyfriend at the time Emmett Kelly. A chef that was trying to get their name known would put on these pop-up dinner parties, we’d perform for them and they’d pay us. I remember learning a bunch of songs and one of them was “My Reverie”. The three of us would play that song for these Valentine Days dinners, LeRoy and Emmet would play the guitar and I would stand up and sing.

“When I heard Mildred Bailey’s voice and I read her story I was like ‘How come no one talks about this woman?’ The way she sings these old songs is so beautiful and wonderful. Obviously, I love Billie Holiday and a lot of those kind of songs, but Mildred Bailey is a little under-recognised I feel.”

“I’ve been going to this lake house in Kenilworth, a few neighbourhoods from where I live. I dated someone very briefly who introduced me to this moss garden there, it’s like you’re in Japan, it has these moss-covered pathways, all kinds of trees and animal life - heron, turtles and butterflies - it’s completely preserved.

“Then I found out that there’s this guy who lives just down the street, he’s 90 years old and his name is David Herbert. My best friend Dev, who I was in Lisbon with, were walking through Kenilworth and we met David. He said we could use his canoe whenever we liked, anyone in the community can use his canoe between 12pm and 12am. Of course we loved that idea, so we went.

“I was driving yesterday and this song came on shuffle. I never have my music on shuffle, I just plug my phone in, but for the longest time it was playing the same songs and it was driving me crazy every time I plugged it in, and for whatever reason this came on. I’ve been listening to Leonard Cohen off and on throughout my entire life, I’ve related to songs like “Suzanne” and all kinds of songs that he’s written, that I think articulate corruption in a way that no one else was really doing, even his own corruption, but with this song, for some reason I keep thinking of David when I hear it.

“I’ve never felt super-close to my own father - we’re close, but typically we’re not very emotional to each other. It took him about eighty years before he said he loved me, but, you know, sometimes it takes people a while to say these things out loud. I feel closer to my father now, but David is that kind of archetype where he seems like a good father. Every time I go out to the canoe, I end up getting into a conversation about life with him, about his experience with fascism and the experiences that we’re having now in America.

“I don’t know much about his personal life, he told me he was an investigative journalist and that his wife passed away a few months ago, she taught at college. They’d been trying to preserve the land around their house so that the city wouldn’t build on it, and they were trying to protect the lake and get all these people involved in saving the lake.

“Every time I go over there, I hear a story from him that changes my life - every single time. I don’t know how to describe it without also creating a super long-winded answer to a Leonard Cohen song, but David is the new person I’ve met in my life who has been really inspiring to me. When I think about the lines of “Night Comes On”, where Leonard Cohen is speaking about a father reminding him that these people have lied, don’t forget, they’ve lied, and him not wanting his father to be right, but he was - he was right. It’s all there in the song and it’s pretty clear what it’s about but I just keep thinking of David, because he’s been an activist his entire life, and not an activist necessarily even in a political way. At eighty-eight years old, he was skydiving, that’s the kind of human David is.

“Recently he found out that the social security office had moved location and that the new office was up a very steep hill. He found out that a private company owns a bus that take elderly people there, but it stops two blocks short of the destination. Then he found out who owned the building, he talked to the city and the government. He was trying to get the bus to take the people all the way to the office, that was all he was trying to do, but the city was taking forever.

“In the meantime, David buys a van and shuttles people there himself. When I think of a father, that’s the kind of human I’m thinking of and to me “Night Comes On” is about fathering yourself through something and going out into and back into the world. Don’t get too attached to yourself, go back into the world, be a part of it, father it and mother it, like you would yourself.

“It’s not a simple song for me, none of them are, but these are the people I want to hang out with, instead of talking about art.”

“It took me a really long time to get into It'll End in Tears and to take it seriously that I liked it, but I really like this whole record. For me, “Kangaroo” is ‘I don’t want to fall in love you, but I’m doing it. I’m doing it again; I’m throwing myself in there. I’m trying not to, but here we go.’

“The song feels like even though he’s describing seeing someone at a party - I don’t know if it’s an intellectual experience or if it’s something that’s more passé - but in my mind I think ‘Oh, this situation has already happened.’ He says, “I first saw you”, as in, you’re not seeing that person anymore… well, not like that.

“So that’s where I’m at in my personal life and I really relate to that right now, having to release love and believe in love, no matter how disappointing every moment can be if you’re that vulnerable and that open. Just being like ‘Hey, I saw something and the way I saw it, I think it was really good. I saw beauty in that and I’m not going to release that from my mind, even if it can’t be that way anymore.’

“It’s my love, these are the things that I see and that’s mine. No one can interfere with that or change it, I get to have that. I don’t think that’s what the song is doing necessarily, but when I listen to it, that’s what I want to hear.”

Whole New Mess is out now via Jagjaguwar