With our music, we don't want to just do one thing. We want to show all these different sides of us and all the different influences that we have.
The acting part of me is not me. The music side is who I really am and what I want to talk about. It'll be hard for people to differentiate those different sides but I think it's possible. Once the music is out there, people will start to realize how serious I am about it rather than, 'Oh god, another actress making an album.'
I grew up in my neighborhood with salsa, of course bachata, but also hip-hop, Nirvana - it was just like a mixed culture. It was a beautiful thing for me because at the moment I started creating music, having all these different sounds and elements, it was very organic because I grew up with all these types different music.
I'm just inspired by life and, growing up, I listened to all types of different sounds, genres, and areas of music.
I'm interested in a lot of different sounds and types of music.
The thing that's good about Hip Hop is that it has experimented with a lot of different sounds and music.
When I started writing music on the guitar, it started off very folky because of my limited ability to play. It was slow, soft melodies. But then, as I got better on the guitar, I started exploring different sounds.
A lot of people these days are not music lovers - they just want to be famous which is a very different thing to what I grew up believing in.
I wanted to try a different way of making music. That's what made me try different things with my voice.
For better or worse, I'm interested in just about everything: every different type of music I can imagine. I can never see a reason to choose just one type of music at the exclusion of everything else. Different types of music are capable of being rewarding in different kinds of ways.
My father loved all different types of music. He wasn't a snob. He wasn't a purist.
I'd experimented with so many different types of music. I had these folky songs I'd written and recorded, but something wasn't quite right.
I find that different types of music are good for certain activities.
I genuinely love Oasis, and I also genuinely love Beyonce. My body gets the same pleasure. If you like different types of music, it's OK to say it.
My genre of music is called Afro-Fusion because I fuse different types of music into a ball.
I'm putting everything on the line in being able to express myself in a different way than rappers normally do. They might say, 'It's rap' or 'It's R&B,' but I'm stepping outside the box and making music for me and making music for the fans to understand me. I'm going the extra distance to be able to come across different.
When you sit down to write something, there should be no guidelines. The main idea is not supposed to be, 'How many different ways can we sell it?' That's so far away from the true spirit of what music is.
Fashion is really a place where every other industry connects, whether it's music or acting. At the end of the day, everyone is going to walk the red carpet and be interested in the fashion side of it. I think that's really cool because as a model, you get to connect with a lot of different worlds.
In terms of negotiating a career - I've always grown up being an insider and an outsider to different worlds, across different classes and cultures, so I have always naturally liked making films or music that puts things in unexpected places.
I was always interested in mixing experimentation with pop music, and Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream - we were all doing it at the same time, just very isolated from each other, all in our different cellars, in different worlds, without the Internet - underground in every sense.
