Rihanna is featured in the February 2010 issue of W magazine, and she talks about her latest album, “Rated R” and opens up a little about how she’s recovering from her messy relationship with Chris Brown.  She does not, sadly, offer an explanation for her Kate Gosselin-esque hair.

On the media circus following the assault, and her refusal to comment publicly at the time:

Looking back, she says she is proud of herself for remaining the quiet eye of the storm. “Not talking was a big thing for me,” says Rihanna, whose 13th tattoo, procured on Avenue B in New York’s East Village just the night before this interview, is visible, still raised and reddened, on the right side of her collarbone. It reads never a failure, always a lesson, but backward so she can read it when she looks in the mirror. “I’m glad I didn’t talk to people, because I was able to deal with things in my own way, without saying the wrong things or giving people the wrong impression.”

On how she coped afterward:

“I started to go crazy after about a month in the house,” she says of the time after her split from Brown, “so I went back to work, and the mic was my therapist. With the mic, there were no negative comments, no negative energy.”

“At first I completely shut down. But now I feel like this happened to me so I could be a voice for young girls who are going through what I went through and don’t know how to talk about it,” she says. “It’s not about Chris, about hurting him or sabotaging his career. I don’t care about that part of it.”

On her latest album, “Rated R”, which was inspired by the collapse of her relationship with Brown:

“This was a different type of record for me,” she says in her steady island lilt, sitting in a backstage dressing room after taping a BET show. “It was really personal; it was from me in the most authentic way. It’s like a movie”—hence the title—“in that when I was making this album, every day I was in a different mood. Sometimes I was pissed off, sometimes I was miserable, and every song brings out a different story.”

“It’s still hard to listen to certain songs,” she admits. “Certain ones I couldn’t even record—I’d keep pushing them back [on the schedule].” There was one track in particular she had a hard time facing. Called “The Last Song,” it has lyrics that read like the final goodbye to a great love. “When the label finally said we had 12 hours to turn in the album, I was like, Okay, I have to do it. I just drank some red wine, dimmed the lights, got in the booth and sang it.”

Rihanna in the February 2010 issue of W: