I don't know how I want to come across looking, really. I just look how I am.

I don't know how I want to come across looking, really. I just look how I am.

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.

It's not too hard to play Fender Rhodes keyboard if you get the right one, with some good action on the keys. If you got an old one that ain't been touched up, it could be kind of difficult to get real loose on it.

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.

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.