The way I figured it, keeping quiet was safe. Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn't exactly overlap with my friends.

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.

Having access to mobile phones and being able to document your own life brings people together.

Commercial music is music that a lot of people connect to at the same time, but that doesn't mean it has to be something shallow or without personality.

When I'm in the studio, I become a total nerd.

The way I figured it, keeping quiet was safe. Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn't exactly overlap with my friends.

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.