Writing this record let me recapture who I am. It is summed up in the title Be Not Nobody. You need to feel comfortable in your skin and do whatever you need to do for yourself, to heal or to grow.
The women who don't feel that people think they're sexy are the ones who seem to titillate in that way, because they don't feel like they're getting that kind of approval.
My mom would give me a piece to play, but I wouldn't do any theory because when it came time to do it I would sneak back upstairs and watch TV. So, I had these kind of nonchalant lessons for years, then it just started soaking in.
I tour with a piano, actually. Luckily I am able to hire people that deal with it completely and magically a piano appears on stage and then magically disappears when I leave.
I learned a lot from that first record and I learned a lot from my experiences touring, but really the biggest education I got over the past two years was learning the importance of arrangements.
I had no album title, and the album is like a journey in that it's a complete body of work. It's not just a couple of catchy songs and filler, so I felt that I needed to capture the essence of the album.
I don't use sex to sell records, obviously, but I'd be lying if I said that I don't feel like I have to make an effort to look good when I go out onstage, to wear something pretty.
I am not this big celebrity, but it gets really crazy. You have to go through the nuts of blowing up, in a sense, and then figuring out how to live your life with that.
But when you hear the complete album, it gets dark, really straight-up rock, with some really intimate moments with just me and the piano. It's not completely me because there are parts of me that aren't on that song, that are on the album.
But the approach to recording this album was kind of an organized, chaotic approach where I wanted to maintain and preserve that wild abandon to creating.
But now - look, I have to take care of myself. I work out every day. I'm a dancer. I've always been an athlete, and I'm one of those people who start to go crazy if they don't run or do something.
But my mom was a pianist, and she taught piano out of her house. I was just so excited, being a little kid and having all these other kids come to my house twice a week. I thought it was a big party.
And it's sad because it's like a surprise to people - almost an anomaly - when artists are actually refined and trained on an instrument. That's the last thing people think about.
A lot of people give in to those pressures and let others influence the process on their second albums because they want to achieve the success they had with their first again, but they don't know how to do it.
