I'm making black music. That's the only outline for me, really. That's the only boundary to stay with. It's soul music. I'm going all out in those terms.

Prince is extremely soulful, but he can get real rock-'n'-rollish. So can Lenny Kravitz. Lenny's real soulful but he's got that rock with him, too. On the whole, I guess black folks ain't trying to handle rock-'n'-roll, really.

I'm making black music. That's the only outline for me, really. That's the only boundary to stay with. It's soul music. I'm going all out in those terms.

I lived in the house with my mother so she had no choice but to hear what I was doing. I would ask her for her opinion. I used to like doing that because I would let my friends hear what I did, but they listened to it on another level. My mom listened to it with a different ear, because she's older.

Since I started playing, really, since I was like three. I imagined myself famous but the vision was blurry, I guess. What you see on TV isn't a realistic picture.

Especially when I first came up here to New York, everybody wanted to hook me up with this guy who's Prince's sound engineer. Almost everybody wanted me to hook up with him and go to L.A. and do all that just because that's the route Prince took. And for a while I was listening to all of that. "Yeah, if it's good enough for Prince, it should be good enough for me." But I mean, that's not the case, really. Prince is a different person than I am. You just got to find the right person for you, whoever you click with.

Watch us, all stand in line, for a slice of the devil's pie. Who am I to justify, all the evil in our eye. Been through hell. All them fools whose souls' for sale. Demons screaming in my ear. Your soul's me, your soul's somethin' that I, feel inside. If I run, Lord only knows how far. You're part of my identity. I sometimes have the tendency to look at you religiously.