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.

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.

In terms of the technology I use the most, it's probably a tie between my Blackberry and my MacBook Pro laptop. That's how I communicate with the rest of the world and how I handle all the business I have to handle.

I don't really marinate in anybody's album because I don't really want to sound like anybody else when I put my album out. So I'd rather not even be tempted to listen to a bunch of other stuff with any degree of emersion in it, cause I just don't want to sound like anything else, so I kinda focus on my own music.

My mother, I want her to like my music, but she's not exactly my target audience. So I care more about the fans in general, just making sure they enjoy what I do.

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.

I was in an a cappella group in school, so it particularly helped me keep my piano chops up.