Kathleen Hanna Quotes

For me, I can only do that from my own experience with people I've known and things that I've lived and experienced. That's what good pop music is all about, pop music that does reach out to people. It's very personalized and very real, honest and sincere.

I'm still writing from personal experiences, which is what people connected with in the first place.

When I'm on stage, and when I'm comfortable or uncomfortable, I have sort of a knee-jerk reaction to try to make people laugh. It's my version of a handshake to show that I want to make a connection and to show what I'm truly like. It's kind of my statement like, "This is what I'm really like. I'd like you to love me."

My advice would be to write what is most personal and specific to your experience or your life. And your voice will emerge and because of its specificity, it will be universal.

To be honest with my music... for me to expect anyone to connect it has to come from a place of honesty.

If I'm honest about the people that I love, then I need my characters to live through the same things that the people I love and care about are living with and struggling with.

My songwriting is personal in the hope that listeners will know that I relate to them.

Nobody ever wrote a story for me. I told in every story what was really inside my gut, and it came out that way. My stories began to get noticed because the average reader could associate with them.

If I'm not writing songs about things I've actually been through, it ruins the idea of making music to me.

I think that people respond to honesty in music, so I only choose songs that are the truth for me.

Everything I've written is personal - it's the only way I know how to write.

I use myself for each part. Naturally, it's my body, it's my soul, it's my feelings. That's the only way I know how to work. I couldn't pretend.

I feel like I have some stuff that matches 'Fight Song,' not in necessarily the message exactly but in the emotion and honesty.

I can't constantly be trying to write the unwritten song, the song that the 15-year-old girl needs. I need to write the song that I need.

To have a songwriter that wrote so specifically what I felt to be true... I've never been much of an actor either. If something is real for me, then I can do it.

For me, the most effective cabaret evenings have been some of the most personal ones, where the performer is comfortable enough to simply be themselves.

I think I take little pieces of inspiration, then kind of do what's real to me and what's going on in my life or what I observe from other people's experiences and hope other people connect with it, too.

I've never been one for keeping a journal, so my songs were my journals. They allowed me to express my feelings and let people know what was going on with me. I knew that somebody would relate.

There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.

The more you're writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it's at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.

For me, when I'm writing something really personal, I don't feel good about it. It's weird that people can connect to it and like something that came from a really crap place. You have to be quite brave to write about something that you honestly feel and think.

If I'm writing strictly for others, how does that show what I'm experiencing or thinking? I just got to a point where I realized I could be as personal as I wanted to be and people could relate to those situations if they so choose.

I'm a big emotional mess. I try to talk about things that people don't like to talk about, especially in music. Hopefully it reaches someone and lets them access their vulnerability. That's what I want it to accomplish.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

It's so easy for me to do a boy-bashing pop song, but to sit down and write honestly about something that's really close to me, something I've been through, it's a totally different thing.