You can always find a stray negative comment on the Internet. It's like everybody loves to put negative comments on the Internet under the cloak of anonymity.

Critics like to describe and categorize things, and categories often have a way of limiting people.

I spent a lot of time, a lot of energy trying to be a better artist and I still [do]. I spend a lot of time focusing on my craft. If you're going to take your passion into something beyond just something for fun on the side, you got to spend a lot of time on it to be great, and then you've got to make smart decisions about who you collaborate with [and] where you live [to] put yourself in the right situations to meet the right people to catch those breaks.

As a young black boy, it made me proud to see black leaders that did something amazing and made the world change.

My first big break came with Lauryn Hill on a track called Everything is Everything, I played piano on that track way back in 1998.

The future started yesterday, and we're already late.

The fun part about collaborating is that you naturally just bounce off each other's energy and learn off each other.