Pink Revisits High School on "Dead"

28 Mar 2006- Pink gave us a taste of her attitude on 2003's Try This, but that was small potatoes compared to the gleeful, in-your-face audacity of her new disc, I'm Not Dead, out April 4th.

"The biggest challenge was the one I put on myself: 'Can you just say what you feel?'" she says. "'Can you let go of the bullshit and be brave, be silly, mix it all up?' I think I wasn't so brave last album."

The disc features thirteen tracks and was recorded over an entire year in Los Angeles with writer-producers Billy Mann, Butch Walker and Max Martin. The excellent single "Stupid Girls" spoofs Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. "My message is you don't have to be that way," she says. "You don't have to be a millionaire to be cool. You don't have to have the latest fashion. I was put on this Earth to make fun of myself and other people."

Pink also gets in touch with her past on the track "Conversations With My 13-Year-Old Self." "Looking back, I have a lot of respect for that girl," the singer says of herself at that age, just before dropping out of high school. "I'm still that little punk -- I always will be, I hope."

The hardest part of her teen years, she recalls, was the sense of nothing to look forward to. "My biggest [message] for young people now is that there's life beyond high school," says Pink. "You're grounded, your parents don't understand you, you hate them -- yet it all goes away. The people that you think are the coolest are not going to be in ten years. So just hold on, it's going to be OK. And one day you're going to write all this down in a song."

The singer's father put his harder times, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, into the song "I Have Seen the Rain," which Pink used to perform with him at veterans' functions. "That's how I learned to harmonize -- that's how I learned to love music," she says of playing with her dad. "I told him, 'I'm going to be famous one day, I'm going to buy you a motor home, and we're going to record that song.'"

"I've done everything but the motor home," she adds. "And I'm working on that."

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