Emotionally, I was affected a lot by Rage Against the Machine, not specifically the literal intention of the words or what it was about, but the feel, the sound, those phrases that got me.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
When I was younger, I was terrified to express anger because it would often kick-start a horrible reaction in the men in my life. So I bit my tongue. I was left to painstakingly deal with the aftermath of my avoidance later in life, in therapy or through the lyrics of my songs.
A wonderful emotion to get things moving when one is stuck is anger. It was anger more than anything else that had set me off, roused me into productivity and creativity.
My biggest influence is rap. It spoke to me, probably because of my upbringing in Christiania. You listen to 'The Chronic' and you can hear that anger and frustration.
When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.
Emphasis on the common emotive or affective origins of music and words in the first cries of humankind undermines words.
I liked the fact that I was forced to get inside of my emotions and to really try to figure out a lot of what I was going through.
There's a lot of rage... you have to express it somehow. If I didn't express it in song, I'd become incredibly violent.
There was one emotional outlet my people always had when they had the blues. That was singing.
What influenced me was Tori Amos, who was unapologetic about expressing anger through music, and Sinead O'Connor. Those two in particular were really moving for me, and very inspiring, before I wrote 'Jagged Little Pill.'
The song that's affected me the most profoundly is probably Michael Jackson's 'Thriller,' or, more specifically, the couple seconds of instrumental break before Vincent Price starts 'rapping.'