Pitchfork: On the album, you sing about misbehaving and driving your parents crazy. Did you feel like a “problem child” growing up?

Rina Sawayama: Definitely. In my early teens, I was so fucking hormonal. My parents were recently separated, so I had a lot of anger. The song “Paradisin’” is based on a true story—I would go out, and my mum would hack into my MSN and talk to my friends and be like, “Where the fuck is Rina?” One time I lied to her and said I was going to a sleepover but I was actually going to an after-party with this band I was a groupie of. I think I was 15. My mum somehow found out which hotel the band was staying in, called the hotel, and demanded to speak to the manager of the band. Then the manager had to call the band and be like, “What the fuck are you doing? That girl is 15, I’m on the phone with her mum right now.” They shoved me into a taxi, and my mum did not speak to me for a week. She always threatened to send me to boarding school, but we could never afford it.

I’m really glad I went through that, though, because I got proper life experience. Like, I went to Paris on my own when I was 15 and stayed with this 30-year-old woman I met through going to gigs. Her house was actually quite gross. She lived with two cats and she smoked inside, so the walls were covered with tar. It just smelled of cat. It was so weird. But a good story.

How did your mom react to your behavior back then?

She forever hated me for that time, though she also understands why I was acting out. I was embarrassed about my mum because she could barely speak English. She had such a thick accent and she would always prepare me really Japanese food for lunch, and I just wanted normal white people food. She would always turn up late to parent-teacher meetings because she was busy working. Even though we literally lived in the same room, we lived very different lives. She represented something that was stopping me from assimilating into my class at school. So yeah, we fought a lot.