BH: Well, I think that the idea of performing gender is something that comes up in queer performance a lot as a centralized performance... but if you contextualize that in what we do, there’s a lot of sort of making fun of the inherent idea of what gender is…. It’s the kind of thing that if Keith Richards and Mick Jagger can wave their cock around in this sort of feminine-but-not, hyper-masculine performance, [and] if Gene Simmons can put fucking KISS make-up on and shit, it’s not that ridiculous for me as a queer person to put on a dress and have hairy legs and be very obvious about my gender performance.

THC: Who or what inspires your music?

LB: I love and hate this question because I always leave someone really important out…. I mean, I can list bands, but I feel that all of pop culture was a big influence on me in general. The bands that I listened to when I was younger were, like, Bloc Party, the Dresden Dolls, Mars Volta, Beck… but I’m just as much influenced by those bands… as I am by, like, reality television, or video games. Those things definitely influence the way I see the world and the way I put things into the world.

THC: Could you expand a bit on how you’re influenced by reality TV?

LB: For the people who are on the reality show, they just kind of have to be themselves but be a more exaggerated version of themselves, which is kind of what I do when I’m writing a song. I, like, take this little inkling of a feeling and just exaggerate it. And [for] the editors of reality TV, their job is to basically take life and distill the most interesting things from it and… craft a simple narrative that can be told in 30 minutes—21 really—out of what is a lot more time and a lot more complex.... Both [instances] are really good ways to describe what it feels like to write a song. It’s like, “Let me take this really intense, complex, drawn-out thing that’s been happening in my brain for six months or 18 years or whatever—depending on the song—and condense it into 12 lines of text that happen in two minutes.” To me that’s very similar to making a reality show.

—Staff writer Ha D.H. Le can be reached at ha.le@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @hadh_le.