Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

If you say 'I'm going to cut this song because I know the teenagers are going to love it ' well then you're going to alienate everybody else. When I cut my record I'm just going to cut the things that I like and whoever likes it likes it. That's too much work to try to figure out the demographic. That's too much like a business.

If you have a line of business - I know this as a CEO - or if you have a teenager - I know this as a parent - who have a spending problem what do you do? You quit giving them money.

Teenage girls these days are more and more getting lured into thinking they should dumb themselves down and that's going to attract the wrong kind of guy and it's serious. It's serious business.

I'm no actor. And I wasn't like George Lucas or Spielberg making home movies as a teenager either. But I would go back and watch certain movies again and again. By the time I saw 'The Graduate' I was aware of how these amazing stories could be told.

Being a teenager is an amazing time and a hard time. It's when you make your best friends - I have girls who will never leave my heart and I still talk to. You get the best and the worst as a teen. You have the best friendships and the worst heartbreaks.

I think all teenagers feel alone and that nobody else knows what they are going through and all that sort of stuff.

I understand and get when kids and teenagers feel like they're alone and it's not going to get better. My advice is that there is a support system out there there are a lot of people who have been through what you're going through and are going through it now.

I'm a teenager but I'm independent - I have my own apartment I have my own life. And I think I have learned more than any of those teenagers have in school. I learned to be responsible leaving my family and coming here alone.

I basically get stereotyped a lot in terms of being a girl and writing 'chick' music for teenage girls or something. I think if anything the press kind of because of my gender and my age tends to kind of relegate my work to this sort of special-interest group. It's part of the cultural dynamic I guess.