Maybe I bring people into that pop world who don't usually find themselves there because there's not enough stuff for them to get excited about otherwise.
So don't stop moving forward. For a while, you may feel as though you're taking two steps forward, one step back. And there may be some personal heartache along the way. But when you look your little ones in the eye, you will find your voice and take a stand for them. We are their voices. And we must have the courage to stand up for them, whatever the odds or however powerful the opposition might be.
You apply the skills you use to produce your own book to make an anthology. Shaping. Rhythm.
[In making music] it's nice to not have a goal, to not have a set format. It's very liberating to just get out of your comfort zone and be in a new space.
If everything really does get better, the way everyone claims, then happiness should be graphable. But that's crap, because better isn't quantifiable.
The marketing is just as important as the music, almost.
And I realized that there's a big difference between deciding to leave and knowing where to go.
Sometimes I think that everyone has a tragedy waiting for them, that the people buying milk in their pajamas or picking their noses at stoplights could be only moments away from disaster. That everyone's life, no matter how unremarkable, has a moment when it will become extraordinary - a single encounter after which everything that really matters will happen.
My parents had an independent theater company here in Sweden during the 1980s, so I was raised watching my parents create independently, having a lot of fun and just doing what they wanted to do. I think that idea of independence as an artist was something I was always used to. And then I entered the industry from a very commercial perspective, and things were very different then from what I grew up with.
The music industry is such a huge machine. There are still a lot of good people in it, but the character of the industry and the culture of the industry is very fast.
The way I figured it, keeping quiet was safe. Words could betray you if you choose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many.
It was like the part of me that had enjoyed those friends had evaporated, leaving behind a huge, echoing emptiness, and I was scrabbling on the edge of it, trying not to fall into the hole within myself because I was terrified to find out how far down it went.
I wondered what things what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable.
Having access to mobile phones and being able to document your own life brings people together.
Prince is king to me. As this half-naked, short black guy who looked like a girl in the 70s and 80s, he was talking about women in a way that was very unusual because he didn't objectify them.
I always felt like I could combine good pop songs that are easy for people to like with a real person and a real mind and integrity.
I don't think of myself as just a pop artist, but someone who knows she has a bigger meaning. I'm not doing this for myself; I'm doing this because it's my destiny.
