I sacrifice in my love life and my social life, but those things will be there in three or four years. This is a really important time in my life. I can't just be the girl who sang 'I Kissed a Girl.' I have to leave a legacy.

I lived my teenage years in my 20s when I sort of left home and became Elton John success, then it became Elton John excess... Everything I couldn't do when I was younger I did 10 times over. I was having the time of my life. I was becoming the person that I wanted to be.

Don't make your career be your life. Let it be your passion. Let it bring you pleasure. But don't let it become your identity. You are so much more valuable than that.

My driving philosophy about making music is that you can reduce it all down to one note if that note is played with the right kind of sincerity.

People tried to do a lot of stuff with me early in my career where they tried to shape me into one thing or another. They couldn't just take the chance and go with my vision - which was just my intuition, really.

Throughout my career, I fed off the fuel of people not being able to understand me.