The singer-songwriter on watching The Hunger 60 times, how EE Cummings inspired her lyrics and discovering magic mushrooms at a Grateful Dead show
Growing up [in Winnetka, Illinois, near Chicago], I was a happy child and I would say an unhappy teenager. I felt frustrated about paying into a system that I didn’t think was going to serve me. Do good, be good, get good grades. I could already tell that it was going to pay out for the teachers and the parents, but wasn’t going to work for me. Getting into college was just as hard back then and the pressure … you saw your friends everywhere, unhappy or with eating disorders or suicidal. It seemed like no one cared. They just wanted to keep pushing you forward, keep making sure that you were going to represent your parents and the area, blah blah. It was a conservative environment where people didn’t dress to stand out, so for the longest time I had two wardrobes. If I wore what I wore in the city to the country club, someone would rush out with a sweater to put over my shoulders because bare shoulders were an outrage.
