LOLA KIRKE

I'm practicing the oboe. But I don't play. Just single notes, not an entire piece of music.

I definitely wanted to be famous as a kid, but as I've gotten older, I feel less comfortable with it.

The oboe is the most maddening thing of all time. I'm struggling to play something that my oboe teacher was doing when she was much younger than I am.

As somebody who has wanted to be an actor who is very young, I can relate to somebody who has been practicing oboe five days a week since they were very young. The physicality of anything a character does is a tremendous gift.

I spend a lot of time doing watercolors and playing music in my apartment.

We have this idea of artists being on the fringe and being debauched and strange. I don't think that people who commit themselves to classical arts should be exempt from that.

The classical music scene was completely unfamiliar to me. It was something that I didn't have the most fun associations around. A lot of people don't - they think of older generations and stuffiness. But it's not. You listen to the Overture of 1812, and you can hear a rock n' roll catharsis.

I'm the only one in my family with an American accent.

I think the merging of high and low culture is so fascinating.

I will never be good at the oboe. No matter what happens, I will never be good at it because I just don't have that much time on my hands. I don't have the gift of going back to being a child and having my brain develop around this instrument.

When I have no idea what to do with how I'm feeling, I generally make a song out of it.

You don't have that interaction with the audience when you're acting for film; you're kind of acting in a vacuum. You're acting for a disinterested grip who just wants to reply to his wife about what time he'll be home for dinner. Everyone else on a film set is also there because they're paid to be there. They're not there because they're passionate about what you do necessarily.

You perform the thing that you made, that's inside of you, and to subject that to any kind of scrutiny is terrifying. It's still terrifying to me.

As soon as I saw myself beginning to be way too comfortable on a film set or TV set, and not stimulated by it the way that I had been that had brought me to want to be there professionally and creatively, was the moment that I started getting really, really sad. I decided, "Okay, I just want to actually be here, how can I make this be interesting for me?"

I had no kind of work ethic and I always felt that music - especially rock 'n' roll - was a more for boys.

The idea of choosing something that you want to be, that you identify as, at a young age and pursuing that without question - for me that was acting.

There's something really natural to me about being what they call in the business a "hyphenate." Being a musician-actor or writer-musician-actor.

I guess I was always envious of people who got to move to New York for college because they got to see the city that I, perhaps, was pretty jaded by with new eyes and discover for themselves that Andy Warhol was dead.

If you're not an actor, or if you're any other kind of artist, there's this sense that, "I must express this thing." Why make a painting if you don't feel like you have to for something inside of yourself? Why make a song if you don't feel like you have to because there's something that you need to get out? And when you're an actor and you're not performing text that you've written, I think there's this bizarre disconnect with the must-ness of it.

Making music is so much more self-motivated. It's my own music. It's my own time. I don't have a team around me that's helped me make everything.

Aligning my music with something that feels morally and politically passionate to me feels good.

Perhaps like attracts like, and that's why I found myself in a circle of women who are so passionate about making music.

It takes a lot of courage to be a performer.

I started playing music when I was 18. My heart was just broken so badly that I decided that I really wanted to start playing music. It felt like the only thing that I could do in response to that. And I've been playing ever since.

Even though I was performing all the time as an actress and I was doing all of these plays as a kid, there's a vulnerability about being a musician that you don't get [when] you perform somebody else's work.