Nirvana was happening when I was 14, kind of the perfect age. Growing up in Anacortes, Washington, it was close enough to Seattle that it seemed like a local thing.

It would be amazing to write a song that could be sung 100 years from now by a teenage girl and still be relevant to her - that's a dream of songwriting, maybe.

I am not satisfied with the ending of 'Mount Eerie' the album, so maybe by calling myself that, I am attempting to elaborate on the ending.

I start with the aim of making something instrumental, and then I'm just like, 'Agh, no, it's not interesting enough. I've got to say something here.'

It was quite a ride and very conflicting for me, too - to be nominated for an Oscar, to be straight and healthy, and to be getting all these accolades while these people around me were suffering and dying from AIDS.

An answer is always a form of death.

The five stages - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance - are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.

Do our children now have to choose between getting an education and dying? Some of us cannot move on and accept that kind of society.