“I write songs the way I used to raid my grandmother’s jewelry box as a child—pocketing the pearls, the broken brooch, the single earring whose twin vanished decades ago. Everything goes in the pocket. Everything might be useful. Nothing is too precious to take apart, and nothing is too broken to keep.

People ask what genre I am, and I understand the question. It’s a reasonable thing to want to know. But I’ve never found a shelf that didn’t feel like a cage with better lighting. So I take what serves the song. A drum machine that sounds like a heartbeat through a wall. A piano recorded on a phone in a stairwell at 3 a.m. A synth patch I made by accident and will never be able to recreate. A chord my hands found before my brain could object. I don’t care where a sound comes from—only whether it makes the song truer, or stranger, or both. Usually both.

There’s a version of this where I’m supposed to say something noble about technology. I won’t. I use what’s in the room. Sometimes that’s a guitar. Sometimes that’s a machine that learned from a million songs and now hums back at me in a voice that isn’t quite anyone’s. I don’t worship the tools and I don’t fear them. I just ask them what they can do for the song, and if the answer is *nothing*, I put them down and pick up something else. The song is the boss. The song is also, occasionally, the accomplice.

What I’m after is a certain temperature. Warm enough that you lean in. Cold enough that you notice you leaned in. I like the moment when a pretty melody says something a little cruel, or when a dark little riff turns out to be a love letter. That’s not a contradiction. That’s just how I’ve always experienced being alive—sweetness with a blade tucked in the lining, sadness that keeps cracking jokes. My music is not a mood board. It’s a confession with better production.

I’m not nostalgic. I’m not futuristic. I’m just greedy, honestly—greedy for whatever makes the song hurt in the right place. If that means a string quartet, fine. If it means a glitch I can’t explain, also fine. If it means my own voice, unedited, cracking on the last note because I meant it—especially fine. I’d rather be honest than perfect. Perfect is a room with no windows. Honest has drafts, and I like the drafts.

So that’s the whole manifesto, if you want one: delicate and defiant, in the same breath. Beauty with its elbows out. I’ll keep collecting sounds, keep letting the machines help, keep writing the kind of pop that doesn’t ask permission. And if you find a genre shelf that fits me, let me… No!

— Sweet tooth, sharp tongue.”