I come from the dirt,
from the woods,
from your brain,
from your darkness
I'm CHRISTEENE
I don't like to describe myself because people always need to
have some sort of a compartment,
to put things in
I just like to infiltrate your world and
try to manipulate your brain to start thinking in different ways
And the music that I make comes from a little bird in my throat
and when I sleep at night, the bird whispers in my ear
and I wake up in the morning,
and I sing what the bird tells me to do
and sometimes the bird is angry and aggressive,
sometimes the bird is sweet as a morning pudding
*Laughs*
I think that art is
a situation that all of us have inside of us,
like a little pony,
that kicks all the time,
and
I think it's just,
people who listen to their pony,
people who trust the pony, and they don't let other
terrible forces out there try to manipulate your own personal pony
kicking inside of you
That, I think,
is the closest thing to whatever the f*ck an artist is
It's just listening to the pony, so I ride my pony hard
Creativity is a beautiful word,
I think it's something that we don't have enough of right now
in the dark realms that we are swimming in
My greatest inspiration
is not music, but it's people who don't stop
people who fight,
every f*cking day
people who get the f*ck out of their house
and get the f*ck away from that goddamn TV screen
and show up to a live room in a hot box because they
need a parson in front of them, and they need to feel the heat
and they need to hear something besides what's coming out of that machine
those are the inspirations for me
I chose to do this show about Sinéad O'Connor
not as a cover band,
not as an homage to Sinéad O'Connor
I wanted to use myself
and the people around me who I am
creatively collaborative with
and have sexual artistic relationships with
to allow the body of work
and the power and the message of this
super powerful woman to go through us
To carry her message and her heat and her energy
so that we could try to address this sh*t that's going on in the world today
I've watched this woman, her whole life, fight
survive,
have compassion,
and extreme vulnerability,
which most people are terrified of
and as this person opened up to us
with important messages,
she was poo-pooed,
by most,
and swept under a rug,
by most,
tried to be swept
and she kept fighting
and she got more vulnerable
and when I go to the catalogue of her music,
it's true and real, and hurts
for her, for us
The album 'The Lion and the Cobra'
pours fire down me
and
burns me bright
because it addresses every
piece of sh*t we're going through right now,
but it's alive,
and it's real and it's raw
and I love
when something that has been made so long ago
still has a voice today and relate
and that this particular album
when it's sat next to this particular woman
becomes such a powerful force of nature
that all I want to do is offer my vessel up to it,
and take in all of that strength, and that heat,
and that beautiful woman's energy and vulnerability,
and I wanna just
push it on to you
and it's going to burn
but that's just CHRISTEENE