Jillian Hervey quotes:

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  • There's been so many, I think [Lucas Goodman and I] share this, but for us, Afropunk was a really big moment just because it was in New York.

  • To be on stage, to be sharing a stage with Lauryn Hill, Grace Jones, SZA, Kelis, and all these incredible women, I'm like 'When did this happen?'

  • You're just always growing. I feel like it's been very fast growth, but super exciting and I know I'll look back and feel like 'Yes, things were stressful, but it was also such an exciting time.'

  • We had spent a lot of time in London [with Lucas Goodman], which has been amazing, but also it was kind of a homecoming and we felt so surrounded by a specific community of people who are just so New York, so unapologetically themselves and so creative.

  • [My mom] put me in dance class when I was really young just as a thing to do and I loved it. I remember being excited every time I went, no matter how tired I was - it was the one thing that I always liked doing.

  • Once you train you develop your own aesthetic and your confidence. So, I think as I grow I'm learning how to be a singer. I'm training my voice and being on stage and singing and dancing.

  • I've always been an animal lover my entire life.

  • We created this journey [in the Begin], sonically, that people can really wrap their heads around and live with and get to know us a little bit more. The dark colors, the light colors, our up-tempos, and our down-dreamy stuff.

  • Architects see the world a certain way, and cooks see and smell the world a certain way. [Dancing ] is always been my lens, what I use to see.

  • [Dancing] was just a nice way of expressing myself, listening to music, and being able to move around and be free, but also really learning something. It was just a nice balance of training and expressing yourself at the same time.

  • You need to have honest things in the world. Even if people don't understand it, if it's coming from you, that's already important.

  • The women in my family are just strong women who do their own thing, so I knew I needed to have individuals like that.

  • Making that statement of 'I'm not afraid to be untamed.' It's just kind of the marriage of those two things.

  • I think having wild, huge hair, is me being my own version of a lioness.

  • I think with the '70s style, you can do a bigger curling iron, so you get those long swirls. If you want it natural-natural, you can also just brush your hair out and tease that. So, it varies on what kind of thing you want to do, but it's nice to have a couple more hands in there to help me or else it takes really long.

  • I think when we were starting off, I picked a group of women to represent me. The top tiers of everyone that I've worked with are women. It felt more comfortable because they can relate to me.

  • I think also, obviously, having someone like Lucas [Goodman], and the people around me are very, not gender-driven or any of that, so when we come in as thing, that's what it is. You can work with us or not work with us and I think that has been helpful. I don't try to put myself in a vulnerable position in that way. I won't just sit quietly.

  • It doesn't necessarily always come down to race in the music industry. It can be whoever has the most money, has the most power, and that's really the struggle - dealing with how crazy money is.

  • Now, it's so sacred. It's how I see the world. I can't help but look at people, their physicality, and how they move. It's how I see everything.

  • Even growing up, if I dealt with any pressure to be a certain way, I knew that as an artistic lane, dancing was the one that was a little more freed up - like no one in my family is really doing that, I can be that person.

  • I was also just strong and quick - it wasn't hard for me to learn how to dance. I was a natural at it.

  • I wanted to fight to get into the front. I was just hungry to do it.

  • It was like I couldn't even begin to tell my mom I was singing. I didn't want anyone to think that she was trying to get me to sing. I wanted to prove to myself I could do it on my own. I really wanted to do a completely different thing.

  • We [in my family] don't like to mess around and talk about our problems or complain, it's just not anything that we do.

  • My main goal was to not tell my mom anything or anyone anything. Even within our family, we like to do it ourselves, we like to be our own boss, and we don't like asking for help.

  • The people that have inspired me the most were dancers and choreographers.

  • As I got older, I started to do it more and more, and I wanted to learn all of the different types. I grew up doing modern, so I wanted to learn ballet, tap, jazz, and African - just everything.

  • I quit piano and violin because it felt too rigid. It was just my thing, something I fell in love with from a very early age.

  • I love to feel that I'm not above anyone.

  • This is what I love to do. I love to perform for people that get it or just want something interesting.

  • Even now, it's so funny how much we do have in common and how much her experiences were similar to mine. But I just wanted to be like 'If I'm going to do it, I'm going to write all of my own music, every lyric, and all this stuff.

  • I love the creation process [of music] of it and then sharing it, so I think that was the shift. I never thought I was going to be on a label in general, I was like 'Oh, I wouldn't do that,' and then we ended up on the same label basically.

  • There's so many people that I feel like as soon as that happens, they can really be and focus on what they want to do.

  • Lion Babe, on a work day, is definitely a process. I obviously could do it by myself, but I definitely prefer not to. It's a lot of hair. I used to start with little pieces, and then it just got bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

  • The main thing I like to do is have a mix of the '70s glamour and emulate a lot of ladies I love, like, Diana Ross, Chaka Khan, Donna Summers. I remember thinking that as a young girl, they were so cool and iconic. I missed that!

  • Like Lucas [Goodman] has said, between the people we've met, and the experiences we've had, it's just our growth. It's just something that represents all of what Lion Babe started as and where we're going.

  • I think, more importantly, it's about who is your core team? Who are the people around you that are going to fight for you and make sure that's all protected?

  • In general, I think the best thing to do is to connect with other females. I love meeting other female artists and feeling like we're all rooting for each other. I think that's shifted even more.

  • There are probably still people that are competitive with each other, but I don't feel that's necessary. I like when we lift each other up.

  • I got to speak to Missy Elliott on the phone and she was like, 'I see you and just keep doing your thing,' and to hear that was incredible.

  • I love writing to my little sister. It's a very nice, easy kind of way I always find inspiration.

  • I think the world tries to put people in a box, like this is the only appropriate way to be beautiful.

  • You know, you always want to just do your own thing - I mean some people want to be exactly like their parents - Ibut I wanted to do my own thing and I ended up doing a kind of mix of my mom and dad.

  • I feel like my dad was the more artistic one, creating his own thing, loving to be around people, and all this stuff, doing exciting things, and my mom was more of the performer.

  • As we're growing and stuff, it's been amazing to feel so embraced and have them be so excited. I definitely leaned into my dad a little more starting out because once we actually started to get those people knocking on our doors and emailing.

  • My mom has kind of been more of the emotional support system. One time I was really feeling all out of it, just dealing with a lot of cooks in the kitchen and adjusting to what it means to be in the music industry, and I called her. One of the first things she said to me was 'You have to be thankful that these people even like you, no one liked me, at all, I was not really accepted for a very long time.'

  • [My mom] has a few choice words to calm me down. I think it's beautiful that I sometimes, weirdly, see myself in a photo and I'm like 'Omg, that looks like my mom.' It freaks me out and all that stuff, but it's also just a part of my legacy.

  • My mom is one, but there have been performers in my family since as long as we can trace them back, so I think it was kind of inevitable to be artistic and to have a force. We're leaders; we're a family of leaders, so I think it's just part of my genes.

  • It's so important to embrace what you have because if you don't, that can be the root of very self-destructive habits, which I think people waste a lot of energy on.

  • I think growing up, you just deal with 'I'm ugly,' or 'I don't look right,' or 'my hair is wrong,' and it's such a distraction from what can really elevate you.

  • Obviously, this is our first album [Begin], so this is our first big body of work that's out there in the world and it really represents our journey, from where we started to now and all the music we created, our range, and all the things that we definitely shared, but weren't able to show our range on a full-scale until this album.

  • Between my mom and dad, I would hear a lot of Earth, Wind, and Fire. My mom loved Chaka Khan, so that was on in the car a lot.

  • I'm a Gemini and Lucas Goodman is a Leo, so we definitely wanted some duality. We definitely balance each other out in a lot of ways, but we're also very different.

  • Because of the time we're in, it's so easy to just blend all of it together and it's kind of like you're listening to everything all at once.

  • I definitely listened to Lauryn Hill - her's was like the first album I bought myself. Brandy's Never Say Never and Lauryn Hill's The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill were always in rotation for a couple of years.

  • Half of my family is in Los Angeles, so my cousin was the first person to play me, like, Snoop Dogg, and I would always feel like 'Omg I shouldn't be listening to this,' and my other cousin was the first to introduce me to Aaliyah, so every time I'd go to the West Coast, I'd get those West Coast vibes.

  • I think just being a '90s kid - I was not a Backstreet Boys girl, I was definitely into NSYNC.

  • Of course the Disney movies, you know all the soundtracks, and anything Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire were doing - Singing in the Rain was one of my favorite musicals I used to watch a lot because my mom came from a theatre background.

  • I grew up as a dancer, and music and dance are so closely tied, that in ballet class you're listening to all this classical music, and in modern class you're working with a live drummer. It was something that always made me feel really comfortable and I've had a connection to since the beginning.

  • Both of my mom's parents were music teachers, so I was hearing the fundamentals of playing the piano, what notes are, and all those things very early on.

  • I've always been kind of surrounded by music my whole life, so my earliest memories of it were just hearing it in the house.

  • I was curious because I hadn't really known anyone to do just that, so I would stop in on his sessions with his rapper friends, and then one day, I told Astro Raw "I'm looking to sing. He told me to try it out and then we made 'Treat Me Like Fire' and everything started."

  • I was working on a piece for one of the things I was dancing to and I needed to have original music. I didn't know where to begin, I'm so bad at computers, and I remembered that he actually made music. I asked Astro Raw if he'd be interested in scoring and he said yes.

  • In New York everyone just kind of knows each other.

  • Basically, my senior year of high school, I was going to look at prospective colleges and I went to visit Northeastern University because one of my friends was going.

  • It's definitely evolved from where it started - for 'Treat Me Like Fire,' I wanted something extremely wild because I was going to be running through the woods and I wanted it really nappy and crazy.

  • South Africa was something that just kind of hit me.

  • I'm a diehard animal lover - I've always loved animals - but it was just one of those trips that I felt like I was going back to the beginning of where earth started. At the time, where a lot of stuff was brewing anyway, to be in such a beautiful and barren land, and just looking at how life began with all these creatures, I just started to really think about animals and time and just all of it.

  • I'm always looking for people to feel connected to me and inspired in their own right.

  • What kind of art do I want to make? What do I stand for? What inspires me? And then to have people in return respond to that... I think that's the greatest thing because throughout dancing, I'm always looking for that.

  • The greatest blessing is that, within all of this, I've still been challenged every day to question and show who I am.

  • Back then, it's weird, because I wasn't consciously thinking about it and I think that's why the doors opened and I had the opportunity. It was a big shift and I realized that you can plan and think your life is going somewhere, but you also have to surrender to what opportunities present themselves and really go for those as well.

  • I had been with a guy for seven years and I was done with that. I wanted to reinvent my whole life and change my hair - I'd had brown, straight extensions forever - and I just wanted to get rid of that, to shed skin, and really just be independent.

  • Being in New York, and meeting really amazing, talented, eccentric, and bold people, and just feeling really excited about life, got me really revved up and I just felt like everything was at my fingertips - that I could try anything. I really felt invincible. It was such a shift.

  • I saw myself traveling with a company or making my own work and being a little weird. I wasn't thinking about the business side of anything, I just knew that I loved dancing.

  • I grew up always wanting to be a dancer and when I went to New York, I fell in love with the idea of performing in all ways.

  • More than anything, it's been a transition into embracing my destiny. I have everything around me to be able to do this properly. Whether or not I was hiding from that early on, I think now it's great to feel that way. It's just the journey.

  • I think my life dramatically shifted when I met Lucas [Goodman] and it wasn't even planned. I had a very clear vision of what I was going to do.

  • Being vulnerable and strong is a complicated thing, but that's who we are.

  • For the name Lion Babe, we are a little avant-garde, a little left. And with bands like Blondie, Pink Floyd, or Jamiroquai, you don't know they're bands, you just kind of hear the name and you're like 'What is it?' so that was the kind of thing we wanted to do.

  • I just wanted to shed everything and do the things I really wanted to do. All the things I was scared of, I just wanted to try. It was like a clearing.

  • I remember just looking at this lioness, she was staring at me, and we just had this weird connection.

  • I think the lion, besides the elephant, was the one animal that I just started thinking about so much.

  • I'm totally into the emotional aspect of things.

  • [New York] gives you room to be weird; you can be yourself and you can wear whatever you want. No one is really going to judge you because everyone is doing their own thing.

  • Transformation comes in a lot of different forms, but going natural really helped me love myself.

  • The freedom I experienced as a dance major in college gave me so much, but the reality of being in school is that you are still forced to work under restrictions.

  • I was shaped in college into a performance artist. I never really thought of myself as being one singular thing. I think of myself as an artist and I feel no restrictions when it comes to how I want to portray what I want to portray.

  • Sometimes words come easily and sometimes they don't. Most songs take me twenty minutes to write.

  • I tend to write about love because I'm always thinking about it. I think a lot though and struggle with overanalyzing. Way over. That's the thing, I feel like I do that a lot and then finally when I stop thinking, that's when it happens.

  • Of course, I'm a dancer. Dancing grabbed me from the start and I have was never afraid to do it. With out dance I wouldn't be singing. I want to expose people to the underground dance scene through music.

  • People just try to put you in a box and I don't see myself in any particular box. I'm making my own box. There's no way I would be able to make the music I'm making without dancing...

  • I'm not looking to be the greatest pop star of all time. I want to be an artist. I want to influence people and I want to get people to think about the world, to think and talk to each other and connect. To challenge one another.

  • This world is going in all sorts of directions, but I think all you can do is get people to think about things in a different way, because sometimes people aren't even thinking.

  • I prefer to do things by myself, but I always bring in people who inspire me.

  • That experience of being in the wild in a place where life initially began for all creatures gave me a overwhelming sense of connection.

  • I would feel weird having someone style me. It would have to be a collaboration. I've had those experiences and every time it happens I don't feel good. What's the point of putting all this work into something and then when you present it, it's not you?

  • I've always loved vintage and I never like to have something someone else has.

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