I'm a Scandinavian Midwest girl who doesn't always know what's going on in herself emotionally, which is why I make music in order to figure it out.
I think everyone has some sort of connection to Gatsby as a character. . . he's created himself according to his own emotions and dreams and lifted himself by his bootstraps from a poor kid in the Midwest and created this image that is The Great Gatsby and it's a truly American story in that regard.
In fact, ballet companies did not exist in the Midwest when I was a child.
It's a character I've created. Actually, that's pretty much the opposite of me, off a farm in the Midwest.
Once we were driving in the midwest and we pulled into a McDonald's. Someone came up to me and asked me why I have Feynman diagrams all over my van. I replied, "Because I am Feynman!" The young man went, "Ahhhhh!"
A lot of people see it as a kind of failure to stay in the place where you’re from, especially if you’re from the Midwest. Like ambition is geographic.