We throw at female artists this expectation that their work has to speak to the female experience. And if it doesn't, you're letting the side down. Throwing this stumbling block in the way of female artists is counterintuitive.

When the lights go out, the parents cry and ask each other what did he do to her, but the girls are burning with a question of their own: what did she do? What does she know now that makes her so dangerous, like the slow amber leak of a noxious fume?

But what you need to understand, my darling," she whispers, "is that this little taste your daughter has had is a taste of what could be. She’s swallowed it. It’s inside her now.

It's interesting that a lot of female artists want to collaborate with me.

I hope and believe we are paving a better future for female artists to come.

At my second record label, they told me and other female artists that some of us were going on the chopping block. I was 19... and it was devastating.