Earlier this week we reported that Iggy Azalea had canceled her Great Escape Tour. That is, however, after the “Fancy” recording artist first postponed her tour earlier this year, with little explanation. Now the newly engaged rapper tells Seventeen magazine why she made the tough decision to call the whole thing off.
Although it appears there are several reasons the “Pretty Girl” decided to call it quits, it all came down to the creative process: “I’ve had a different creative change of heart,” she says. “I want to start totally anew, and if I stayed on my tour, that would mean I wouldn’t even be able to start working on that until after Christmas.”
“On top of that, mentally, to be honest with you, I just feel I deserve a break,” she explains. “I’ve been going non-stop for the past two years, nearly every single day. I’m not in a bad place. I think sometimes when you say you need a mental break, people are like, ‘A mental break? Be sure you don’t have a breakdown because you’re sad.’ No, not necessarily,” Azalea said of needing to take a break.
“It’s very emotionally draining to be on all the time and going all the time, planning all the time. It’s a lot, and it’s tough. I need a break from everything to just enjoy what I worked so hard for, and I don’t really feel like I’ve had a chance to do that,” she adds. “I need a break to figure out what I want my sound to progress to, and I need a break to figure out how I want my visuals to progress.”
She explains that performing the same songs over and over can “kind of wear on you.” (But isn’t that what touring is about?)
“I am a musician and a creative person and I want to be able to perform new stuff and do new things,” she adds. “I feel like I’m at the end of an era now. To go on a tour in late September and to stay in that mindset of what I’d envisioned for that tour, I feel like that would stifle me.”
At the end of the day, Azalea claims that in an industry filled with talented up-and-coming artists, she couldn’t find just two opening acts she thought would be “a good fit” for her tour.
“There are people thinking it’s me giving up, or me failing at something, somehow,” she continues. “I said to a friend the other day, ‘The only reason why at this point I would stay and do this tour is to save face publicly, or to not endure publicly what people will say if I cancel it,’ and that’s not a good enough reason to do something. So that’s the choice I made.”
Add it all together and Azalea said she wasn’t having it. What do you think of Azalea’s explanation? Sound off in the comment section below.
