I was sitting in my apartment in downtown LA listening to the Michael Brown protests going on outside my window and seeing a bunch of ignorance and hatred being spewed by my peers online and I was so filled with frustration and helplessness because it seemed no one was willing or able to see beyond their own realities and instead were so quick to condemn and judge. For me, songwriting is a quick and explosive process. Sometimes I've even written songs while asleep - woken up with a melody and lyrics in my head remembered from a dream. I went to the piano to distract myself from all the hatred I was reading online and the song just kind of happened.

The song ended up being a conversation between a woman of color and a white man about the innate differences in their realities and social privileges, one trying to convince the other about the existence of privilege, and the other trying to distract from it by pointing out her gifts. The verses were told from the female point of view, then somehow the chorus just came out from the male point of view and I just went with it. Normally, I would have tried to keep it all in one voice but it felt right as a conversation because that's what I felt was missing from all of the posts online - a conversation. People were so entrenched in their own perspectives that they refused to acknowledge the others'.

"Skin" has been a bit of a social experiment for me. Most people who have listened to it have picked up on the references to feminism and male privilege, but have completely missed the racial aspect of the song, and that's what the initial inspiration for it actually was. I think this is because many people are more willing to discuss male privilege because the line separating men and women is still a much more socially acceptable line to draw than one separating people of different races.