The music is everything to me.

I'm always looking for just the right song that has something to say.

A friend of mine that happened to be a DJ at another club actually offered me a job [as a DJ]. I didn't think I could do it but he said, "You know all the music. You are at all the parties, and everybody knows you."

I used to tell myself when I was much younger that I didn't want to wake up one day and be 32 years old and still playing records. It's just not going to happen. Well, the joke is on me, because I'm 56 years old now.

Well technology has changed a lot of things, making it possible for just about anyone to make music. But not everybody is a songwriter, so that puts me in a completely different ballpark than the other DJs out here that are writing and producing tracks. I don't stop at tracks, I try to complete the whole package with the song. So working at that level has put me in a completely different place.

The minute you think you're greater than the music, you're finished

The first job I got when I was in high school was working for a department store in New York. I worked in the stockroom. That's when I learned that I couldn't work for anyone else, because I was spoken to in a way that I wasn't spoken to at home.