Once I come up with the concept, the rest of the song just comes.

As soon as they say I don't sound as good as my old stuff, I tell them, "I would never sound as good as I first sounded, because you guys didn't know who I was. Being that I'm in rotation, you guys are getting used to the sound, so now you expect another track and another track, but it never happens again, no matter how hard I try."

I got older - 16, 17 - I was like, "I want to do my own thing." I wasn't seeing eye to eye with my parents. It wasn't what they wanted for me.

I got my own sound; nobody sounds like me.

A lot of people got something to prove. If I had something to prove, I proved it already, so why do I have to go showboat? Like, I don't say I got the hottest song in the world. And, personally, I think otherwise.

After the years of me trying to figure out what I wanted to do with myself, I knew I had to go back and fix some things. I can't just be super-rich or whatever and not do the right thing.

People make their life really hard. It was as simple as this: My parents went to church. My grandfather was a bishop. My mom sang in the choir, my dad played the keyboard, and my uncle played the drums. I was into playing the drums, so I played the drums a lot for my uncle, and it got to the point where I was pretty nice at playing the drums. And he let me play every Sunday so, to me, going to church was fun.