I'm a natural piano player. So all the practicing I do at this point is in my head. If I don't play for a year, my chops aren't going to get any worse. I've spent my time playing scales, and I don't necessarily want to play any faster than I play. So everything I do at this point is more philosophical.

At 14, I was playing in clubs until 3 A.M. My dad was the district attorney of New Orleans and my mother was a judge, so I saw hookers and drugs but I never wanted that life.

'The Christmas Song,' by Nat King Cole, is not only a masterful performance; to me it just sounds like the holidays. I've never sung it, because Nat's version is so perfect. I gotta leave it alone.

I sing because I’ve forgotten how to scream.

[My mother is] a half-Chinese, half-Jamaican woman, who grew up the ninth of nine kids, getting a law degree from Harvard. Academically brilliant, but also incredibly strong-willed and ethical. My mother was like that, my sister is, and my wife is too.

I say sorry to my wife about five times a day for various reasons.

Life is really like that: there are certain things that are wonderful and certain things that are not so wonderful and what you are going to do about it. With grace and with dignity, move through them. Deal with them.