Iggy Azalea: I thought about quitting life

After enduring a rough year punctuated by a canceled tour, celebrity disses, and public outcry that forced her to back out of a scheduled performance at a Pittsburgh Pride event, rapper Iggy Azalea told radio host Zach Sang that she considered withdrawing from the public eye.

“I thought about quitting life,” the Australian artist said, but quickly noted that her love for making music kept her going. “It’s my whole life. This is what I do. I’ve been rapping since I was 14, and this is all that I know. It’s what my gift is, whether you think I’m talented or not. I don’t know any other job and I’m not interested in any other job.”

Still, Azalea said intends to try her hand at TV production in the near future. “I started a production company, and I bought the rights to a couple of books that I really like, and also some television shows from Australia,” she told Sang. “I talked to BBC Australia about some [kids shows] that I really believed in and was a fan of when I was a kid, and I had some ideas to rework [them].”

Azalea said she plans to put the past behind her for a fresh start in 2016, a year that already includes a new single, “TEAM,” from her upcoming album, Digital Distortion, which she has worked on with pop star Bebe Rexha, among others. “We live in this world of technology and social media, [and] you might have somebody else tell a narrative or story about you online that isn’t factual, or maybe you might be representing yourself in away that isn’t 100 percent accurate,” she said of the album’s inspiration. “Unfortunately, we don’t have control over our digital narratives at all.”

Azalea does, however, have control over her decision to postpone her wedding to basketball player Nick Young, so that she can tour her new material. “I was going to get married in August, and I planned everything for it,” she said, but hinted that the delay of her album reshuffled her plans to wed. “I postponed my wedding to tour, so I better [tour] or I’ll have to answer to Nick!”

Speaking on her canceled Great Escape arena tour, which was to take place last year from April to May, Azalea said that the timing wasn’t right, and that she wasn’t as inspired by material that she felt had grown stale. “All that music [on my last album] existed for maybe two years before it came [out], and you live with songs for a long time, and you get burned out on them,” she said, further revealing that she plans to tour two to three months after the release of Digital Distortion. “Maybe you don’t enjoy performing them as much, because they’re old and they’re not where you are creatively. That’s how I felt with my last album when it came time to tour, so I really want to make sure I avoid that this time.”

Watch Azalea’s full interview with Sang in the video below.