You see all these things that make you feel desperate or sad, but you realize changes can be made, and it doesn't take a lot of money on our part to make a change in people's lives.

For me I'm actually doing what I normally do when I do my solo thing and the other thing is actually more new to me.

Well, I was always a bit of a political junkie. Even as a kid I would read biographies of presidents and of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

Women are dealing with the same thing: they're dealing with expectations about how they're supposed to look and how they're supposed to interact with men. I think we're all trying to figure it all out, especially when we're teenagers, but I think the key is to listen and empathize with one another.

Sometimes I just think people are haters. And if they're haters, you can listen to what they have to say but you have to take it with a grain of salt.

If you want the film [La La Land ] to represent all things jazz, it does not. You'll be disappointed by that. But, if you just see it as one guy's point of view, one filmmaker's point of view, and one story among many stories that can be told about jazz, then it's not as much of an issue.

I don't get to listen to music for fun very often; a lot of what I'm hearing is for work and isn't released yet.