It's really about making the best music you can make. It's really about working hard.

I was the front man of the choir and then when I was 12 and I was the leadsinger of my highschool groups.

Every artist wants some sort of feedback, because you make this music and you hope people love it and you want to hear if they love it and what they love about it, what their favorite song is, what they think the next single should be. I like to hear those things.

If a relationship is going to work, it will require compromise and, even then, it is not always going to end the way you want it to.

I have a great band, with very talented players, and we give everything we have every night.

But in my mind I've always been a solo artist- I've just been working with a lot of great people like Kanye and Alicia Keys and Jay-Z.

You have to be careful when it comes to copyrights, whether just sounding like or feeling like something is enough to say you violated their copyrights because there's a lot of music out there, and there's a lot of things that feel like other things that are influenced by other things. And you don't want to get into that thing where all of us are suing each other all the time because this and that song feels like another song.