Artists in general never stay in the same place, we keep growing. It's still you, you still have that core that you always had, but you work with new people and hear new things.

No matter how big or successful and famous you become, if you do that, that's the most fulfilling thing, is making music that you love and that you're proud of.

You have to be careful when it comes to copyrights, whether just sounding like or feeling like something is enough to say you violated their copyrights because there's a lot of music out there, and there's a lot of things that feel like other things that are influenced by other things. And you don't want to get into that thing where all of us are suing each other all the time because this and that song feels like another song.

Marvin Gaye was one of the coolest. I look to him as a style icon and as an artist.

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.

Now that I'm coming out with my own record people can see I'm a solo artist.

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.