If you take a bunch of superstars and put them in a room where they don't have their assistants and entourage, it's funny to see what happens.

Smokey Robinson is one of my heroes as a singer and songwriter, a major influence on my own music from the very start.

I definitely dislike pomposity and artifice. I hope that I'm not that. Once I write a song, it belongs to the world, and the way people perceive it, it's cool.

I returned to upstate NY where I just laid in bed for days with a fever that just wouldn't go away. After more of this, I grew increasingly sure that this was not simply the flu!

The biggest honor of my career was when I won R&B Artist of the Year back in the 1970s. I look at that as a major honor.

I grew up in a very racially integrated place called Pottstown. It was an agricultural / industrial town which has since become a suburb of Philadelphia. I grew up basically in a black neighborhood.

If you work hard and you're good, you can build something for yourself.