It's important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I'm from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don't live in the ghetto but every time I go back, I'm seeing the same things that I lived. That's one of the things I mean when I say, "My feet back onto the ground."

Social justice has always been a part of my inspiration. For example, when the Vietnam War was going on, I wrote a song about that.

I'm very attached to my family and protective of them and miss them, and that situation, my connection with that can make me become very vulnerable.

Good thinking brings good feeling and good feeling brings good thinking.

I have not become the artist I believe I am. I want to become a stadium act. I'm not done at all.

The love is the part of us that can never go. It's the essence that was always there, so that can never go.

I am not one of those artists who is cemented in one way. I am able to, you know, make the happy, jovial, lighthearted music too. We need that in life too. So it's like that to me.