Music is much more of a multimedia sort of thing than I expected.

Music journalists are some of the lazy, most uninspired, dull people I've ever met...

I was raised by all women. I had no men in my life; it was my mom, my sister, and my grandmother. I've never identified as a man. I've always either felt like a boy or something else. I feel really uncomfortable thinking that, technically, I'm supposed to be a man, because I don't feel like one.

[YSL creative director] Hedi [Slimane] is a music-obsessed guy. I might've originally met him through Sky.

I've already had a hard time dealing with some of the trappings of success and turned to some pretty stereotypical escape routes - ways of escaping my own reality and falling into some pretty clichéd situations.

There's all these people involved, and it becomes this huge machine - it stops being just me making my own little songs for myself, or for the world. And it's hard to stop the machine. If you want to take time to write a record, they're like, "OK, tour through March, April, and June, then you can take a few weeks off to record in July before getting back on the road for the European festival circuit." After a while, I had to put my foot down.

I had these glorified ideas about San Francisco and its drug culture - I thought inspiration would just hit me and I would get these San Francisco drugs in my system and all of a sudden an amazing record would come out. But that's not really what happened at all.