Hip-hop has been the guiding light of my life as a musician and a music fan. It's the one common thread through all of it from the time I bought my first record probably. It's always been there.

Its always important to fall back on your instincts and core beliefs and that was pretty hard for me to do but trusting in my self the way I trusted that if I were to sit at a piano for two hours and I was going learn something, that trust I'd put in myself really helped me get through it. For five to six months I just wrote songs and believed they would turn out to be things I could be proud of and be happy.

Sometimes my hands they don’t feel like my own; I need someone to love, I need someone to hold.

I didn't start playing music really until I was 18/19, so it was a relatively new thing. I didn't play much music in school.

With music, it feels natural that, in my head, I can pull things apart and then put them back together very quickly.

The idea of trying to predict what people will or won't respond to is risky.

I'm not an L.A. guy. I don't take meetings - you know what I mean? I don't really know how to interact very well with people in L.A. because everybody's got an agenda and everybody's like, "What do you do?" "Where are you going?" Or it's like, "What do you know?" And I'm not on a grind - I was there to make music and to meet people but I wasn't hustling for anything.