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.

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

Music is really everything I know. To be honest every experience I've ever had has been brought up from music and everything I do is because of music. I don't know anything else, I think about music before I go to sleep and it just really is everything that I am.

I'm mostly a keep-to-myself kind of guy, but you slowly find yourself getting folded into the musical tapestry.

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.

I don't know if I'm attention deficit, but I certainly am easily distracted by other things.

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.