In this interview with The Improper (www.theimproper.com), Pink wants you to know she’s someone who dares to try new things, even if it means falling on her face.
Pink wants you to know she hasn’t mellowed. She is someone who dares to try new things, even if she risks falling on her face.
The crazy, party chick with 20-odd tattoos and great hair was married in Costa Rica earlier this year to motocross star Carey Hart.
She’s the kind of person who wants to push herself and branch out.
Who sometimes takes the mickey out of herself to distract attention from more serious stuff going on elsewhere.
Perhaps this is what attracted the directors of forthcoming horror-flick “Catacombs” to Pink when they offered her a lead role after a lunch in Los Angeles.
“We didn’t even talk about the movie. Next thing I’m on a plane to Bucharest thinking ‘What if I suck?’” she says.
During the shoot she was “kicking the walls in frustration,” crying, wailing that she wanted to go home.
She called it “ a huge learning experience…” Did she understand why they’d picked her, almost completely untried as an actress?
“The part was pretty much written for someone who could be cruel and tough. Well,” says Pink with a grin and a shrug, “there you go”.
No doubt the directors recognized someone who knows how to engage with an audience.
After all, she’s sold 23 million albums, and won two Grammy awardes.
A boundary-pusher whose songs, videos and personality speak loudly of a character way more interesting, rounded, flawed and real than any of her peers.
On her new, fourth album, ‘I’m Not Dead’, Pink takes her trademark honesty and genre-hopping, and runs with them – hard and fast.
“This album is a product of my own experience. I don’t hang out with celebrities. I hang out with real, nine-to-five people.
My family is real working-class. I’m very much in tune… I don’t sit holed up in my mansion with my poodles and think everything’s fine.
I like to stir things up, create dissent, create discussion and highlight the ridiculousness of it all.”
She talks about her attitude and outlook on life and music in a Q&A with Maria Vincent.
Improper Magazine: You have called your most recent album your most personal ever, but can it really be more personal than ’Family Portrait’?
Pink: I didn’t call this album my most personal ever. I think that it is very personal.
I wrote ‘Family Portrait’, now it’s time to write about other things. I’ve written about the past, present and future.
Every record I make is really personal, but I don’t like to repeat my self and probably won’t write another song about divorce. (Laughs) I hope!
IM: Do you think you have become a more serious artist?
Pink: Yes, in some ways, but I’ll always be goofy. But in many ways I’m not sixteen anymore.
IM: How does that reflect in your recent album?
Pink: All over it. I think vocally I’m better, more practiced. Practice makes better.
Lyrically, I have written some of the smartest songs I’ve ever written. I think more about the world and less about myself.
I’m very, very, very, very happy about where I am right now.
IM: What other talents, besides making music do you have?
Pink: I have a talent for making other people uncomfortable. Challenging their deeply held convictions and making them defend their views.
And I have a talent for making cupcakes. I make really good cupcakes.
IM: How are you different from other celebrities?
Pink: Nobody’s the same; everyone is unique. Every once in a while I go to premieres and parties, I like to have fun, free drinks.
But I would much rather stay home and be with my dogs, my friends and my husband and, my family. Read, books, play pool and make cupcakes.
IM: Do you hate the pretty party girl, because you are jealous?
Pink: No! I wouldn’t know what to be jealous of, apart from the fact that I can’t shut my mind off, and I heard that ignorance is bliss. (Laughs)
IM: Describe the perfect party?
Pink: People who know how to have fun, a karaoke machine, booze and my dogs have to be there!
Once at a party my dog was fed with 33 devil eggs and she was sick for a week. I kicked every one’s ass for that!
IM: Are you ever uncomfortable in the way that you are living on the edge?
Pink: Yeah, I like to go out of my comfort zone. Talking to someone I wouldn’t normally talk to, surrounding myself with smarter people, trying new things: learning how to ride a dirt-bike.
You know, putting myself in different people’s positions and going to new places and trying to learn their language.
Being an open book, allowing people to judge me and look at me from under a microscope, just everyday.
The most daring thing, I don’t know. But I think making the record ‘Missundaztood’ was a start. Trying to make it when everyone said I would fail and fall on my ass.
IM: What was your driving force to make ‘missundaztood’?
Pink: That I could speak for myself better than others could. I knew what I was doing, and the saying, “if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it” doesn’t always apply.
I just get bored easily and I don’t like taking orders. I always wanted to make music because it’s very personal thing.
And I thought you would connect to your producers and share your life stories and sit around a bonfire and make the music you always wanted to.
And when you’re in the popworld , if you allow it, you are carted around to the hitpeople, and you shake their hand and you sing their song, and they get their check in the mail and you don’t know their middle name, there is no passion, and I don’t like that.
IM: Who is your best friend?
Pink: My best friend is a girl called Laura Wilson and she is the smartest person I have ever met in my life and I love her.
IM: Where do you know her from?
Pink: I met her through (singer-songwriter) Linda Perry five years ago, and I stole her away, and took her on the road and she was my assistant and now she is my manager, it’s just awesome.
IM: It must be cool to have your best friend be your manager?
Pink: It’s perfect. It’s interesting, when we do business we take our friendship and put it over here (she moves her coffee cup away from her), and when we’re not we put our friendship over here (moves the cup back in front of her) and then we go dancing.
IM: So you don’t fight or anything?
Pink: We have had fist-fights, but we love each other, so we always make up.
IM: Seriously?
Pink: We had one recently at this hotel.
IM: And who won?
Pink: No one, because our drummer broke it up.
IM: So you have quite a temper?
Pink: Um, no! I’m usually pretty cool, calm and collected. But you know I can go there.
IM: Which European musicians do you like?
Pink: I love Regina Spektor! She’s a really talented musician and made a record called ‘Soviet Kitsch’. And I like Franz Ferdinand.
IM: What is a typical recording session with pink like?
Pink: It starts with a bottle of wine, a cigarette, an acoustic guitar, and a person that I’m connected to. And we talk and find out what mood we are in, play around, have fun and create a song.
IM: Have you made peace with your childhood?
Pink: Well, not a hundred and fifty percent. But writing songs have helped a lot.
