For me, no matter how much money you want to make off of singing, no matter what kind of fame you want to make, achieve, the most important thing to me is making music that you're proud of, making music that comes from you, comes from an authentic place in you.

At the end of the day, there's only a few major stars in the music business, and then there's all these people that are aspiring to be that.

I wrote the song "Show Me" as a prayer to God asking simple, honest questions about life and death and why there is so much suffering in the world. As I grew with the song I realized I shouldn't limit these questions solely to God; I should ask those questions of others and of myself.

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 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.

People tell me all the time that my songs help them express things to loved ones that they may not be able to say themselves.

For me there's insecurity when you're releasing an album because you spend all of this time working on that one thing and then once it's done, it's done. After you put it out there to the public you never know which songs are going to work or even if the album is going to work as a whole so there is a little bit of nervousness around predicting what the numbers will be and if it's going to be well-received.