I'd stopped doing music all of a sudden, and because of Chill and Jay and B, I got half of my album on a solo project. Then I get a call a week later and Jay is like, "Yo, Janet [Jackson] likes one of the records. We'll take five but are you cool with giving Janet one?" I was like, dude, we can do whatever you want to do.

I don't like when everything sounds the same.

I had to learn, because as an artist myself, an artist owns that right to protect their interest of how they want to roll their project out. It's just important to give them that opportunity to roll it out the way they want to.

You know Beyoncé, man. She's very quiet about how she does things. She doesn't like to let everybody know what she's about to do.

One half was like, I hope this doesn't affect it, and the other half was like, it's great that people know I did a Beyoncé record.

Generally, you're always shooting in the dark with Beyonce. She's just creative and eclectic and up on always trying to be ahead of the game. That was the moment of me trying to figure out how I wanted to give her another moment.

I never feel like I've done good enough. That's why I'm always so excited about working because I gotta keep pushing myself to do better work, to do great work.