Sky Ferreira: No one listens to me

Sky Ferreira is bored of 50-year-old men telling her "how to be a woman".

The model-and-singer has been working on her debut album Night Time, My Time for five years and it will finally be released this year.

Although the 21-year-old is thankful to her label for sticking with her, she could do without much of the advice she's been offered by executives over the years.

"I do a lot of stuff behind their back. I have to because nobody ever listens to me! I do have supporters at the label, but I still have to deal with a lot of people who are like, 'Er, I don't want to spend that money on her,'" she told British newspaper The Guardian.

"I have this reputation from 'insiders' for being difficult, but people only considered me difficult because I wouldn't just agree with everything they said. Like, 50-year-old men telling me how to be a woman! Seriously, I used to get nagged about combing my hair. They would tell me I needed more make-up and that I had circles around my eyes. I've had that since elementary school - I used to get called zombie."

Sky has been through a great deal in her life. She was raised by her grandmother as her parents didn't feel ready for children when she was born and spent a lot of time with Michael Jackson as her grandma was his hairdresser.

"She went everywhere with him, so I was always around him and his kids," she explained. "I had birthdays there, I sang gospel music for him - he was kind of my mentor, so he influenced me, but more as a friend than as Michael Jackson, the pop star."

Sky was sexually abused during her childhood and she says many of the tracks on her record are about the experience. As a young girl she didn't understand what was happening to her, but when she was abused again when she was older she did go to police. She didn't find them helpful and has decided to be open about her experience in the hope it will help other experiencing the same thing.

"They [the police] blamed it on me for being quiet. They said being quiet made me the target for it," she recalled.

"At school there might be an ad that says, like: 'Rape is bad - tell a counsellor,' but it doesn't really work like that."

Last year Sky hit the headlines after she and her boyfriend Zachary Cole Smith were arrested for drug possession in New York. She had ecstasy on her and he had heroin, but Sky insists she has never tried that drug.

"I've never done hard drugs. I am the world's first heroin addict who's never taken heroin," she claimed.

The star insists she took the incident seriously, but prefers to relay some of the lighter moments of her arrest. She joked she was horrified when she was handed a pair of Crocs to wear on her feet, as she finds the clog-like footwear so unfashionable. Sky also dislikes the mugshot of herself in an orange jumpsuit, preferring one which shows her in other clothes.

"Personally I prefer the blue mugshots they took when we were first arrested," she giggled. "The orange one is after I've been crying for, like, 12 hours. Which was a bad idea because they were telling me I had to stop crying otherwise they'd put me in a mental institute."