Drag has always inspired people to come together to be joyous and fight for what matters. If we can do it through beauty and positivity and lip-syncing our favorite pop songs, then let's do it.
I would have hated for my 'Drag Race' moment to have come down to lip syncing a Whitney Houston song.
That openness to experimentation in Seattle is how I learned a drag queen doesn't have to just be in her pageant gear and lip syncing to top 40. Drag can be off-the-wall, ridiculous, profound.
The term 'popular culture' always used to mean what the people do - pop songs, folk songs, music in general used to live because people would sing these songs and tell these stories together. Then all of these new technologies came out and it became the work of professionals.
My aim is always catchy songs, or songs with meaning and I want to write music people can relate to, about things anyone could go through, just real, honest music... songs that mean something, songs that are inspired by true life events.
I feel like if we stopped pushing people away in trying to get to the top, we could work together. My goal is to start with my family and my friends, progressively get better and create opportunities for them to express themselves and become happy people, then have them affect the people they're around. [I want to] create this growing effect of positivity and inspired a willingness to overcome any obstacles that are in front of you, whether it be from our government or from our daily lives.
I was like, 18 and it was in West Virginia because I was allowed to get into the clubs in West Virginia, not Pennsylvania where I was growing up. And we went in and there was a drag queen on stage and she was huge and beautiful, but she was lip syncing to a song. I was legitimately stunned.
For me, the good songs are the ones that come really naturally. There are certain songs that you rework and rewrite and the craft becomes very evident, but a lot of times those aren't my favorite songs. The favorite songs are the ones that I can't even hear my own voice in.
There's always room for your hard-core country songs, and that will always shine through, and I'll always have those on my albums. And then I'll have fun stuff that gets people up and dancing that some people may want to say, 'Well that sounds real pop-y!' but I don't really think it does, I just think it's what's going on.
I think I was always joyous, but I don't think I became very aware of positivity and its power until I became older. I always did it naturally, but then I lost it, and it forced me to find it again and appreciate it more.
I was arrested for lip-syncing karaoke.
Acting in a music video is basically about lip syncing songs and giving expressions that represent what the song is about. While acting for the silver screen, you have to deliver dialogues, remember them, and you have to be in a certain frame of mind.
I could be inspired by something I see or something I hear and write down or send to a friend or a writer or whether I have instrumental tracks or just a couple chords recorded on my phone. If I have a couple sessions set, I'll go into the studio with the people I'm lucky enough to call my friends because I feel like I can talk to them and then suddenly our conversations turn into these songs you hear on the radio. I still don't understand how it happens but I talk about my experiences and my situations and everything and then they turn into these amazing pop songs.
As pop songs, the early stuff like Electricity' and Enola Gay' were such inspirations to Gwen and I, especially melodically. They inspired us to try and do our own John Hughes prom-scene movie moment kind of songs.
If God is Mother, then we need only gather together with people and adore her through rituals intended to satisfy the female soul, ritual involving dance, fire, water, air, earth, songs, music, flowers, and beauty.
I don't like the lip-syncing-type videos. I like for people to listen to the words and see the visual.
There are some songs where I'll have had the music for 20 years and then finally the lyric will come through. That's not common but it does happen. Then there are other songs that come really quickly.