And then, also, when you're doing something that doesn't sound like anything else on the radio at the time, you almost need to, like, ironclad it to make sure it gets through, you know?

And sometimes, I'd be allowed to be hanging out in the studio, which I just loved kind of, like, being in the room with these big recording desks, with all these, like, buttons and knobs and watching the guys use them.

So when I was working with Amy Winehouse on "Back To Black," you know, she had all these beautiful songs, incredibly well-written and just her on an acoustic, nylon-string guitar. And she'd play them for me, and then I would kind of drum up my idea of what I thought - make a demo with what I thought the drums should be doing, the guitars - like, quite a crude demo.

I didn't start making music in order to be famous.

DJing is an art that I have the utmost respect for, and I've been practising it since I was 17 years old. Doing Tom Cruise wedding-type things becomes the focal point of every interview, and you realize that you have to cut it out if you don't want to be answering questions about that.

Dave Guy, the trumpet player, is an incredible musician. He came into the studio one day, and they had just cut a cover of "Sign, Seal, Deliver" for something with Sharon Jones, and I just was blown away by how they got that sonic. I mean, it was just so much the real deal.

Being a die-hard Knicks fan, I remember hunting down these orange-and-blue Nikes that they only released in England. And I used to hunt for sneakers when I DJ'd in Japan. But then Nike flooded the market with a head-spinning array of color combinations and it just didn't seem cool anymore.