I don't feel like that many musicians are competitive with each other.

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.

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.

I want to make a better record than I made the last time. I want to grow. I want to discover new things about myself creatively.

I was a busy kid in high school - a little bit of an overachiever, I guess. Prom king was kind of silly, but the rest of the stuff was important to me.

The best way to fight poverty is to empower people through access to quality education

When we see people that are impoverished and people who are dealt an unfair hand, then if we have the power to help them, we should try to do that.