I think it's one of those things about live performance - anything goes, anything can happen, and you have to just be ready and able to roll with the punches.
I think I'm someone who is really prone to melancholy, and the super heavy, thick shows kind of spiral me out into not being able to be as happy a person as I think I deserve to be, so I tend to watch things like 30 Rock and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Anything Tina Fey's involved in. And Parks and Rec. I love comedies!
I do a lot of reading on Buddhist philosophy, and a Buddhist nun named Pema Chödrön talks a lot about acceptance. It's one of the main tenets of Buddhism - accepting that what is, is. The root of our suffering is when we just don't want to accept a truth. We want something to be different than it is.
I know that I'm very susceptible to getting caught up in storylines like, "I want him to be different. I want him to be more open. I want him to call." We have all of these storylines that kind of take over sometimes, and I think there's real grace and a peaceful heart at the center of just accepting what is, and knowing that everything's OK. The good, the bad, the ugly, the pain, the hurt, the frustration - all of that is valuable and part of this human experience, so we should lean in to all of it.
I think it was the perfect gestation time for this particular piece [ Sounds Like Me: My Life (So Far) in Song]. One of the songs that I considered talking about was "Manhattan," because it was chronicling the end of a long relationship that was part of the reason why I moved from Los Angeles to New York, which was such a life-changing decision. I don't regret that it's not in there, but that's one that I considered diving into, and I have little piecemeal snippets of writing about that floating around
I think that's my hope for a lot of the feminist movement is that the gender thing sort of stops being the selling point, if that makes any sense. We're just people making art, and that's how this process has felt to me.