Now my record deal helps me to do things for free or give more time to my community than I could otherwise.

In music, it makes for a good platform to take time and really mold a piece the way I need to mold it. When it comes to fashion, I create a functional art that moves.

Erykah Badu projects don't even sound like Erykah Badu projects. I don't even have one album that sounds like another one of my albums.

I have an apartment in Brooklyn - I guess I call it my shrine. I go there to create and recoup, or hibernate sometimes, but my home is in Dallas where I live with my children.

My fourth mother, my godmother, she passed away a couple years ago - her name was Gwen. She was the theater director over at the gym where I grew up and learned about all those awesome things I told you about already. She was the one who taught me terms like "upstage" and "downstage," all those technical things about the art of what I do - how to breathe what I see, how to move. They were all her tactics, not anything learned or given to me through a theory, but rather by her natural abilities.

I'm pretty mutable as a human being.

I don't read music or anything, so when I produce, I go basically by ear.