Q-1: After the success of "Pon De Replay" last year, "SOS (Rescue Me)" shot up the charts to No. 1 as soon as it was released. How does it feel to go from being virtually unknown to having this type of success in less than a year?
It is crazy because I see everything happening but none of it's really hitting me. I don't... like, can it get better? It's so weird because everybody calls me, "Your song is number one," and I'm like, "Thank you!" But I'm still in shock, I still haven't, like, really freaked out and thought, "Oh my gosh, my song is number one." I'm still trying to make myself freak out. If you have the number one song in the country, you should be smiling every second.
Q-2: Your story almost seems like a fairytale: You were discovered in Barbados by a music producer; you were flown to New York to meet Jay-Z; he signed you to Def Jam. Is it really a fairytale story or is there more to it that we don't know?
It's really like a fairytale story. It had a lot of work put into it, but the signing was done in a day. Like, I couldn't ask for more.
Q-3: You released your second album only eight months after the first one. What made you decide to release it so quickly?
It basically felt like it was time, y'know? I was... my first album, I was thrown out there, and I mean, I was just a little girl coming from Barbados into a big city and a big country, and doing all this promotion and it never stopped, I had to learn to fix a lot of stuff myself, but I feel like I've grown five years in just a year, and I really want to show people that. And Music of the Sun was more like my introduction to the world: "Hey, I'm the girl from the Caribbean." This second album, this is a big step up from the first one. A Girl like Me, it's really... it's this girl from the Caribbean; what's it like to be a girl like me? And I think if you do that, I show people that by speaking of different real things, of different topics of my life.
Q-4: You've said that coming from Barbados, you hadn't heard much rock music before. What type of music did you grow up with and how did that influence your style?
I listened to a lot of reggae music, which has influenced my music highly. Um, I love R&B artists, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Destiny's Child, um, hip-hop music... Kanye West... that has all influenced my music. I try to fuse songs together... and now I'm using newer songs... like rock music... they don't play all records in Barbados unless it's reggae, so I didn't really know about "Tainted Love" [which she samples in "SOS"] a lot, I'd heard it a few times, I didn't know about Soft Cell or any of those older artists, until I moved to America, y'know, and I put that in my music, I fused that with pop and R&B and made a new song. That's art, yeah, I like to be creative.
