Juliana, talking about the track Chunks, from an excellent interview by Grant Walters for Albumism:

It’s got a couple of different inspirations, but I guess the most obvious one is just the feeling of wanting to punish the bad guys—and just taking it to a cartoonish extreme. I mean, I hope people can see the humor in it and understand that I don’t actually want to do these things to people. It’s just a feeling I know a lot of people are having, you know, this feeling of rage and a burning desire to punish the bad guys because we’ve seen so much exposure of rottenness in the past four years. Just so much hatred, and corruption, and greed, and nastiness.

People feel unable to do anything about it and this feeling of futility, so I just put them into a song. But then, also, there’s a feminist reading, and sometimes I look at it as a song about how women are expected to behave in this society and meant to be friendly, polite, accommodating, quiet, pleasant. And, you know, if you raise your voice or if you take offense to something, someone will say to you, ‘why can’t you be nice? Why are you so rude?’ So, it could be seen as a feminist reaction to society’s expectations of womanhood. That’s another kind of reading on female anger and how people are dealing with women’s anger.

From an excellent article by Justin Chadwick for Albumism where Juliana comments on each of the songs on the new record:

“Every Breath You Take”

This is another one of those deceptive creations that at first makes you think you are listening to a straight-up love song. But really it’s pretty twisted, sung from the point of view of a creepy stalker, a person who won’t go away, who is obsessed with an ex. The song structure—the way it moves and flows and builds—is perfection. It’s sonic ambrosia. I can’t get enough of it. This song is the gift that keeps on giving

From an excellent interview by Grant Walters for Albumism:

GW: You mentioned this sort of default mode that you adhere to when you’re writing songs. I’m curious to know as an artist where and when your observations of the world around you engage? What ignites your motivation to create a piece of music?

JH: Well, I guess it depends on where my head is at while I’m writing. When I was making Pussycat before ...Olivia Newton-John, I was caught up in national current events, and that was kind of all-consuming at the time, and that’s just what was on my mind. It was my reaction to everything going on coming up to the presidential election. And then, when I was younger, I was just totally self-absorbed in writing about my own angst and anguish and my emotional problems. I was just really wrapped up in that.

I think now, rather than just looking inward, I’m trying to place myself in the context of the world around me a little bit more—just talking about how I see things, how I see myself in the world as it is today. With the new album, it’s seeing myself as kind of an outsider in society. It started out as wanting to make an album about the comfort of living in a very small space, and not venturing out much and having a very small radius of an existence—like, a five-block radius outside of a small apartment. And just how comforting that can be rather than isolating.

I mean, that was the concept, and it became a little bit more than that, but it was coming to terms with a solitary life and trying to see it in a positive way rather than any other way.

Grant also puts Juliana on the spot to pick her 5 favourite records of all time.