Let’s talk about flute—what’s your relationship with that instrument? Do you get a different feeling performing flute than you do rapping?

[Voice goes all dreamy] Yeeeaaah, the flute! She is very, very, very important to me. It was my life. I practiced for hours and hours and hours by myself until I was the best in the state, and then I wanted to be the best in the country. I just wanted to be the best for myself. I have a very competitive streak, and that was where I was able to unleash all of my competitiveness. It was very important to me to go to college on scholarship and study flute and be a flutist. I wanted very much to be a principal flautist in a symphony somewhere. I was looking up some of my favorite places—obviously Boston was huge, but I was gonna start with Houston! [Laughs] Gospel brings out the most emotion in me. The second genre that brings out the most emotion is classical music—there’s nothing more exhilarating than the last movement of a piece, and everyone’s just going toward it, the theme is being driven…The vibrations that you feel, sitting in that chair, with all of these people playing that harmony—it’s incredible. It was definitely my life for a long time. All the way up until my sophomore year of college, and then I just couldn’t do it anymore. I wasn’t going to study flute. I had been living this double life for a long time, a life that had been exposed to pop culture, and hip-hop, and wanted to assimilate and be a part of that. And then there was the other side of me—that bookish, quiet, competitive, serious girl who just wanted to be the best. I was trying to live my life as a late teenager and have that double life, and it just wasn’t functioning anymore. It overwhelmed me—I started feeling the realities of what it’s like to be a professional flute player, and waiting for somebody to leave before you could have their chair. It seemed like a lot of waiting, and it was also very set in stone. It overwhelmed me. I still hadn’t had the confidence as a vocalist, that moment where I found my voice exactly. Something in my gut told me [leaving] was the right thing to do, and so I stopped. The sad part is that I don’t play flute nearly as much as I used to. Actually, someone hit me up a few months ago like, “Hey, I got a new book of flute duets, you wanna come over and do some flute duets?” I was like, sure! I missed that so much, sight-reading accidentals, and finding out what a melody is for the first time. It’s just like freestyling rap—when I freestyle and I get that feeling, that final sprint in the race, that’s like playing flute. There’s so much movement and excitement. My pupils probably dilate!

What classical pieces would you recommend to someone who’s interested in that world?

Everyone’s different, but I would definitely say there’s nothing like Russian romance music. It was psych music! You could turn a lot of Shostakovich’s pieces into sad songs if you wanted to. My favorite piece ever is Kalinnikov’s “Finale in G.” It’s so beautiful. There’s just something about Russian romance music—it is so angry, and it’s so brassy, and it has so much soul power. They were having conversations in their music. It wasn’t just like, “Hey girl, I think you’re pretty,” but, “We need freedom! I am upset!” That spoke to me so much.

So did you quit college?

Yeah, I did.

Was it tough to leave? Did you talk to your family about it?

It was really hard. I felt like I evacuated or something. I turned my back on my flute, which is really weird to say, but I feel like I let her down. On top of that, I feel like I let a ton of other people down. I didn’t actually talk to anyone about it. I left, and I went up to Denver—that’s where my mom and my brother were—and I just stopped talking. I think I was mourning for a life I could have had, like [studying in] Paris and playing the flute. The life that I created for myself and fantasized about since I was 12 was kind of gone in an instant. I lost it for a minute. I would like to say that maybe I took a vow of silence, but it was more like, really, really, really, really tightly wound anxiety and sadness that kind of swallowed me, that I couldn’t really get out of. It was a hard time—three or four months of me sorting it out.

How did you move past it?

I wasn’t completely silent. What happened was, I would do this weird thing where I would come alive at night. I’d leave the house at 11 or so and I would walk really, really, really aggressively—you could call it a jog—and I would sing every word to B’Day from top to finish, loudly. I was a bad singer at that time. I was 18 or so, and I felt like I just needed to do it, to let it out and find my voice. I shut my voice off to find it. Through B’Day, I was able to begin to see what that voice sounded like.

What comes next?

Well, first of all, it was like unhinging my jaw, as if it was wired shut. That was so hard. I don’t even know how I could afford a plane ticket to Dallas but my mom took me to the airport, and I unhinged my jaw enough to say thank you. I don’t think I was at “sorry” yet. I’d decided right then and there I wanted to be a singer and figure it out. Feeling like my purpose was shattered, I had to create a new one in that three-month period. I was also listening to the Spring Awakening soundtrack—this Broadway musical about unruly schoolchildren. I learned all of it and was like, what if I auditioned to be in Spring Awakening? I had all these new goals to reach. I set the bar really, really high for myself, so that every time I tried to leap over one, I would stumble and fall, but I didn’t lower the bar ever. I think not lowering the bar was important. Because the bar was so high for flute. To study flute at the Paris Conservatory, to be the best, is setting such a high bar. That’s something in my personality that I didn’t change. Even though I didn’t pursue my first purpose, I wasn’t going to lower myself for anything else. If anything, I would raise the bar higher.

What did you do in Dallas?

[Laughs] I went to Dallas and I auditioned for American Idol! It’s so embarrassing—I was trying to avoid saying it. My really, really good friend was auditioning for American Idol, and I remember being like, You know what? I’ll just go and support him and audition too. He’ll be there and I can get a ride back to Houston. Ohhh, but that is not the way it went down at all. Of course I didn’t make it through. I’m grateful for it, but I was also devastated! I remember being in the bathroom crying, like, “I’m supposed to be a singerrrrr!” [Laughs] So funny. Then I got to a friend’s house and stayed with her, and kinda worked myself back to a human being. I just erased everything. I had to build myself back up. Then I got to Houston and auditioned for the rock band, and as soon as I was in the rock band, my destiny clicked back into place. I started to feel like my purpose was back, which was good, because I had snapped there for a second. It was a pre-midlife crisis!

How did you take care of yourself? What did you do just for you?

Oh, nothing! I didn’t learn how to take care of myself until this year. I was flinging myself all over the place. I was very, very obese when I was in college, and after that I kinda snapped, and I became addicted to exercise. I worked out a ton. That’s the only thing I remember doing for myself. I would jog, or I would be at the gym for six hours—it was not healthy for me. I am still trying to work things out, but it got to the point where, at the very end of my Houston experience, I was homeless, or house-hunting, and I was absolutely dead broke and wearing some hand-me-down clothes and bumming it, staying in the studio that my band played at or rehearsed in. Or sleeping in my car—this car was a piece of work! My sister’s car that she let me have, it was T-boned completely, caved in on one side, so I’d be pulled over by the police, and they’d think I’d just been in an accident. Thank god Houston isn’t cold, so I was able to survive. But I was very much in survival mode. I didn’t know how to take care of myself. The only thing that was important was music. I didn’t care about myself.

When did you make it to Minneapolis?

At the end of the Houston experience, I needed to flee again. I knew this guy who produced music, and he wanted me to sing and rap with him. He lived in Denver, I’d see him every time I went to visit my mom. I remember, at the end of [my time with the] band, I was on stage, and we were doing karaoke. I was so drunk, crying, so sad, and I sang “If I Were a Boy.” It was my last night in town. I was screaming it, they were like, “You go girl, it’s OK!” I remember the next day I flew to Denver, and I wasn’t there for long. I reconnected with this producer. He was like, “I’m moving to Minneapolis, my parents live there.” I was like, “Dude, it’s cold, I’m not living there.” He said I could stay with his parents, just to try it out. I happened to go in the spring, and I played a show, and this girl was like, “You have to live here!” She was very emotional. I was like, “OK, maybe, whatever—what else am I doing?!” Seriously. I did it a few months later. It was 2010, the summer. And from then on, it’s been amazing.

You’ve talked about this period of your life when you refined your energy and dialed back your personality, both musically and personally. I feel like a lot of us shrink the big parts of ourselves as teenagers because we think we have to in order to be accepted. How did you manage that without losing yourself in the process? It seems like you were doing it really consciously.

Yeah, definitely. It was because I’m a lot! I’m a bunch! I get really self-conscious about being overwhelming to people. I remember [feeling like] my true self was so very strange. I was friends with some huge personalities, but they were cool. My friends from Houston, they’d be cheerleaders or something. I had a huge personality, but I was into Sailor Moon, I liked classical music, I would write fantasy novels at 3 AM, it was insane! I decided that that side of myself needed to take a back seat. This is when the dual life began: The bookish side poked out when it wanted to, but then my pop culture, hip-hop, cool assimilation began. I was like, I’m gonna leave [bookish] you at home, girl, home with my Sailor Moon scrolls on the walls. I’d put on my Reeboks and go to school. A lot of me dialing [myself] back and refining, though, had to do with creativity.

I started off very wildly on flute. I was almost self-taught. I don’t brag about much, but I brag about flute: You don’t end up as good as me in the school district I was in from having private lessons. I wasn’t set up to be as good as I was. I had to really practice and do it on my own. I played a lot of things by ear, and I was really, really, really self-taught. So by the time I got to a teacher—I was a junior, I think—I was already competing. I remember, she was like, “You’re like a wild horse. Your fingerings are all over the place, your breath control is insane, your vibrato is—what? And you play so fast!” She said, “We need to take you back a notch.” I was like, “OK, whatever, I still can play really fast, so what!” And then with singing, I started off so loud, and I had to take myself back a notch. By the time I had been working outside of the rock band, [my bandmates] were like, “This is electropop music, you can’t be yelling all over the place, this isn’t the Mars Volta.” I just learned how to refine myself. In refining myself, I found the purest of me. The essence, I guess, the marrow in the middle. I think it’s important to find that, man. That’s the good stuff. I had a lot! But I can also find the laser point of me. Don’t hide yourself. I don’t think it’s important to hide yourself like I did. I think that everyone’s experience is so unique that you have to do what you gotta do. Yeah, it happens to all of us, to the best of us, and I think that I was very fortunate to find the positivity in that and not completely lose myself.

The title of your new album, Big GRRRL, Small World, feels like a celebration of that idea.

Yes, absolutely, that is it right there. The whole record is me finding me and being good. [My first record,] Lizzobangers, I always say, is me coming out of being in all of these musical relationships where I had to share. Lizzobangers was just my one mind. I had had writer’s block, it’s just this yell, like, “Hiiiii, oh my god, all my ideas, all my thoughts, everything you’ve ever wanted—here it is!” But Big GRRRL is definitely me knowing me much better, and being excited about it, and proud of it. It’s self-discovery, I think, with Lizzobangers being the journey, being so lost in your self-discovery that you’re kind of angry sometimes.