I've always made sure that I tour with bands that people aren't expecting me to tour with.

That's one of the most important things to me is that Detroit and Ann Arbor got my back. If you don't have hometown love, then what's the point?

My intentions with any of my music is to keep it futuristic and updated and be experimental and try new things.

Gary Numan had a huge influence on both my music and my style. He had his own unique fashion sense - that futuristic space style. It was out there.

I grew up in the '80s and '90s listening to Public Enemy and Mobb Deep and the Smashing Pumpkins. I don't even know what it was like in the '60s - I wasn't alive then - so the Mayer Hawthorne sound is taking what I can learn from the classics, and blending it with my hip-hop DJ and producer background and punk-rock bands that I played in as a kid.

Barry White is my musical hero. He was the guy who you danced to in the club and then when you took your lady home to the bedroom, you listened to him there, too! That's who I always wanted to be - the guy who was always there.

I was a hip-hop head. When I really found my own lane in music, it was hip-hop. I wanted to make hip-hop music. And I did, I made a lot of hip-hop music.