It's not that I didn't love myself before. Sometimes we don't realize that we are compromising ourselves. To understand that a person is not good for you, or that that person is not treating you in the right way, or that he is not doing the right thing for himself - if I stay, then I am not doing the right thing for me. I love myself enough to walk away from that now.

You can't take life for granted.

You get to a point in life where it suddenly occurs to you that you don't need all the things you once thought you did--that it's really, well, convoluted. My life feels overblown sometimes, and I don't want it to be. I want it to be streamlined. So I'm living a much more unscripted life now than I have in a long time.

Everything I wanted before, I want twice as much now. And that doesn't mean material things; it means to explore more, to think more. Being an artist doesn't start because you're 21, and it doesn't end because you're 51. You are who you are until the day you die.

I would never speak about specifics in my own relationships because I think it's tacky. If you seriously want to know, listen to the music.

The truth is, everything that's happened was supposed to happen. That doesn't mean I don't look back and think, God, I wish I hadn't had to go through some of those things.

My main priority now is that my kids are happy; that's my number-one focus in life. Are these little people happy, content, and getting everything they need? Everything after that is secondary. Before, my work was my main priority -- even above myself.