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.

Like I say, it depends on how you do rock-'n'-roll. If you do it right then I think people will appreciate it for what it is.

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.

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.

I don't know what scared me about Marvin Gaye. I just know that he was scary, and that all of his... his aura was frightening to me. I can't explain why.