With my childhood and growing up in a very free place where my parents were artists and always encouraging me to explore, you wouldn't think I was locked up in my own mind, but I was.

So much of myself is consumed with earning my way, doing it myself, and never feeling like things are being handed to you. Growing up that way was humbling.

I always think it's a little bit of a challenge when people sort of associate female artists as their own genre.

It's funny: when I was a kid, my mom would reorganize the record collection all the time. She'd have classical, she'd have Celtic, she'd have rock and roll, and then she'd have female singers. And I don't like it that female singers are their own genre.

American media has just become talk radio, incredibly partisan name-calling and op-eds. I think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan proved it has completely failed to act as an effective fourth estate. And young people didn't sleep through that, as is widely believed; they learned instead not to trust what they were being told.

Obviously, aging has a certain amount of mellowing process because there's certain things you realise you were doing when you were younger that were plain ridiculous, stupid.

The only movies I want to do are the ones I'm passionate about. I care about school, and I'm still a kid. I want to live like that while I can.

I'm blessed that I'm not content. Whenever I work with kids, which I'm passionate about, I want them to know that, yes, two World Cups, two Asian Cups, but I've done it the hard way.