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To me, my peers are Bruce Springsteen and Mick Jagger. I'm not talking age-wise, but in terms of careers. Madonna. Those are my peers. And I'm okay with that.

I prefer career artists that have spent time honing their craft, as opposed to, 'I won a karaoke contest on a reality show and now I have a record.' That's such a drag. The music that comes out of it is so poor.

You look at most artists, the arc of their career, there's a definite decline at the end. And that decline could set in at any time. In your 50s, or your 60s and 70s if you're lucky. Time goes by fast, and you've got to be busy all the time.

With my friends in Brooklyn, many of them started out as artists. I saw many of these friends move into late middle age, still struggling without health insurance or a cushion. I saw people who had given up being artists. Being an artist necessitates a compromise or living on the edge.

Don't expect fame to come overnight. That filtered through to me in my own career. Look at Madonna: she's not the best singer in the world, but she's got where she has through hard work.

I feel like everyone directs their own career according to their taste, what they migrate to emotionally and what kind of artists they want to work with.

At the end of the day, there's only a few major stars in the music business, and then there's all these people that are aspiring to be that.

I just turned 40, and I look at so many performers and so many people who are actually always on time and always have an album out. They don't have actual lives, in my opinion. I feel like I'm so much more than being famous and meeting a musical quota. And I don't know, just the weight of the scrutiny and attention is too weird for me.

I think that most people who are just artists, who are getting famous, would trade a lot of their fame back for some normalcy, pretty much immediately.

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.