Standing up for herself! Iggy Azalea canceled her planned North American Great Escape Tour last week, and the star is defending her decision in a new interview with Seventeen magazine.
Azalea, 24, was scheduled to perform arena shows throughout the United States and Canada in the upcoming months. The tour was originally supposed to begin in April but got pushed back to September before it was canceled completely.
"I've had a different creative change of heart," the star began in her chat with Seventeen. "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."
"I've been going non-stop for the past two years, nearly every single day," Azalea continued. "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. 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 added. "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."
The abandoned concerts were scheduled to promote the Aussie's debut studio album The New Classic and its follow-up, Reclassified. While she won't be hitting the road, Azalea has been continuing to record new material, recently releasing the collaboration "Pretty Girls" with Britney Spears.
"On top of that, once I postponed [the tour the first time], I couldn't find two opening acts," said Azalea, who originally recruited Nick Jonas and Tinashe for her shows. "I began the search, and to be honest, I never found someone who was available on those dates that I thought was a good fit for the tour. It just seemed like it was so many things pointing me in the direction of not doing [the tour], that I finally thought, when enough things come your way, you can't ignore the signs."
"It's not easy to decide that the best thing to do is cancel a tour, but that's the best thing for me," she continued. "I don't want to disappoint fans. I feel really bad. It was a tough decision to make, but it was the best thing. There are people thinking it's me giving up, or me failing at something, somehow. 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."
Azalea recently made another big choice, this time in her personal life. On Monday, June 1, the star's NBA love Nick Young asked her to marry him and she accepted his proposal.
