Singer says she is "embarrassed" that she returned to Brown after assault

Rihanna has sold more than 12 million albums, and has had four No. 1 songs, but now her fame revolves mostly around one fight.

The singer hopes that will change on Nov. 16, when her first live performance since her Feb. 8 assault is streamed worldwide by Nokia mobile music. And when her album “Rated R” drops a week later, she believes fans will have insight into what transpired between her and ex-boyfriend Chris Brown in the wee hours of that morning.

“I can tell you that making this album was my recovery. It’s the way I vented and expressed myself,” a confident Rihanna said in our interview. “The minute I decided to leave the house again, I called up (Roc Nation A&R executive) Jay Brown and said ‘I want to do music, I want to go back in the studio,’ and we just did that. We started collecting songs and sounds and putting producers together, figuring out who we want to work with to develop new sounds.”

That decision to jump back into the music game was preceded by decisions beyond Rihanna’s control. Almost immediately after the assault, an unidentified person leaked a photograph of Rihanna’s bloodied face. Cue the paparazzi; cue the rabid public interest in Rihanna’s personal life.

“I felt like I went to sleep as Rihanna and woke up as Britney Spears,” Rihanna recently told Glamour. So how’d she make the call that it was finally time to leave the house again?

“I was getting cabin fever. I kind of hid in the house and didn’t want to be around people,” Rihanna said. “One night I just said, ‘I want to do the most ridiculous thing and go to a nightclub.’ I went to the most hopping night....

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