One of the expectations growing up was that I'd become a well-known artist.

I grew up always around music through my father - I would play in music studios with him as I was growing up - and my high school, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts.

Growing up, I feel like my character was so much about being a problem-solver and a truth-seeker and always needing to get to the bottom of everything.

Mark Ronson was a dear friend through family and through growing up in New York, being in that scene, and Mark came to a show and really liked it and asked us to join his record label Allido records, or 'all I do' records, and that was sort of a development deal.

I found it an interesting portrait of a marriage in exploring notions of how one partner supports the other, whilst not jeopardizing the greater good - which is the family.

I noticed that no matter where I went in the country, there was this group of questions that got asked. I would track them and keep them in categories. Like body image, school, family, friendship, you name it, the emotional life of a teenage girl.

I only have one child. But I am learning that there is a lot to being a parent that you did not expect.

In America we tell our parents to bring their child home and put him or her in a crib; as they get older, children sleep in they own room not in Mom and Dad's room. What are we training them for? It's independence, because that's what being empowered is all about.