First of all, let me just say that I never would’ve imagined when I started all this—like, it never would’ve crossed my mind when I was making those recordings with my dad back in St. James—that when I “made it,” that would mean I’d be spending the biggest chunk of my time with these enormous dudes who used to be Army Rangers and professional wrestlers and mob enforcers and Secret Service members. LOL.

Not to say that these dudes are scary. I mean, if you fuck with them, one hundred percent they’ll get in your face, but I honestly have some of the best, like, coolest, most professional and hilarious and amazing guys protecting me on the day-to-day. I’d probably just be straight up dead without them. Seriously. I would’ve just like, exited my car one day and been torn to shreds by a bunch of crazy ten-year-olds in Argentina. That’s how bad it was getting.

I first realized I needed a security detail when this woman tried to kill me in Australia.

I was doing this thing at a radio station in Sydney, and this was right when the first album dropped, you know, so we were still sort of adjusting to the magnitude of the thing we had created, and so we pulled up to the radio station, and like, yeah we were expecting a crowd, but when we got there, it was a fucking army. It was just me at that point and my dad and my road manager, Bobby, and like, I guess the person that the radio station had sent with us to come pick us up at our hotel, and the second we opened the door to the SUV, the whole crowd just MOBBED it. It was like they were a pack of zombies and we were the only people left in the world with fresh blood. And this fucking girl, like, this absolutely insane woman, just out of nowhere, comes rushing up to me and starts kissing me on the mouth. Like, they weren’t sweet kisses or anything like that—she wasn’t being cute about it. They were really aggressive, like, really violent kisses, like she was trying to suck a demon out of me or something. And remember, I’m fourteen at this point, so I’ve hardly even kissed anybody in my life. And now here was this like, to my knowledge, fully grown woman, just aggressively kissing me and biting my neck and shit, and she looked like a fucking vampire. Like, if you had told me she had been exposed to some crazy chemical in a lab and that she was a mutant now, I’d believe you. She did not look human.

And my dad and Bobby were trying to pull her off of me, you know, and we were all kind of freaking out, and she took out this nail file and started swinging it around at everybody. I’m not even sure it was a nail file. In my mind when I remember it, I always think it was a little scalpel or something, you know? Like, what scientists use to scoop up a bit of sample?