FKA Twigs Impersonated Cats On Weekends as a Kid Because, Of Course

FKA twigs is pretty clearly a different type of artist, but in a recent interview she explains a bit about how she came to be the dance-centered, avant-garde performer who is shaking up what it means to be a black, singing and dancing woman.

“With my profile growing, it enters into a world of people who don’t understand me and they’re never going to understand me,” she says in a behind-the-scenes interview at the YouTube Music Awards. “I don’t expect them to understand me and I don’t want them to understand me. That’s also OK and in a way kind of exciting to have it spread it into a place where it doesn’t belong … if everyone did get it, I’d feel like I’m doing something wrong.”

Twigs explains that her mother was a creative sort when she was a child and allowed her to roam free to be, for example, an animal of her choosing for the weekend.

“If I wanted to be a cat for the weekend, that was cool,” she says.

Elsewhere she admits that after working hard to perfect her craft of dancing as a kid, she realized that performing in videos flew in the face of her lessons.

“When I trained as a dancer from when I was eight years old and I did ballet, tap and modern. I worked my ass off when I was a kid to be trained properly and then the first music video I did, it’s kind of ‘Can you put on these shorts? Can you stand over here? Can you look cute? Can you rub up this rapper’s leg?’ I remember thinking ‘Ugh, ten years of training for this?’”

In talking about the use of dance in her newest video for “Glass and Patron,” she says, “Dance can be twisted somehow. You’re not considered an athlete, but you’re not considered to be included in the artist group either. I really wanted to show how the dancers moved and have it be about them as much as it was about me.”

She goes on to say that pregnant women can be sexy, which is why she portrayed a pregnant woman giving birth in the video instead “doing squats.”