Brandy On Cussing And Talking About Sex

LOS ANGELES (Top40 Charts) - For a long time, Brandy's been fighting to break out of the mold set by the squeaky-clean image of her music and now-defunct UPN sitcom Moesha. She surprised the world when she sported a tougher exterior in the horror flick I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, but listeners were still taken aback by the tone of the some of the songs on Full Moon, her third album, released last month.

On the album's lead single, "What About Us," Brandy sings, "I don't need this bullsh-t," when referring to a love gone bad. And she pleads, "please touch me like this," on the rousing album track "Like This."

When journalists spoke to Brandy about expressing more adult themes on the album, she said she planned the content of her songs carefully. "I was definitely conscious about how I say things, and what exactly I don't need to say because I have created a name for myself. And, I do have very young fans as well, older fans, but I do have a lot of young fans. So, it was a way for me to be aware of that, and I did that, I think, with this album. But I still went there. I went there in a very tasteful way. I went there in a very lovely way, I would say," she said.

Brandy added that her more mature subject matter wasn't an attempt to earn respect as a bad girl. "I'm not rebelling against the good girl image or anything. It's just that I'm not Moesha. I'm Brandy, and there are certain things that I have experienced that she has not experienced, and I just wanted to remove myself out of that vein. And just let people know that this is coming from a truthful place. This is how I feel, and I think the performance that was given on this album showed that this is not just a new image, a new look, a new everything. This is who I am, and you can tell by the way I'm singing," she said.

The singer/actress, who secretly wed producer Robert Smith last summer, is expecting their first child, a baby girl.