I just want to make music as long as I can and reach as many people as I can.

I make soul music for hip-hop heads. It's music I'd want to sample if I were a rapper.

I just want to make music as long as I can and reach as many people as I can.

A big part of the Motown formula was, they took music and turned it into this sort of automotive assembly line. They were cranking out 10 songs a day in that studio, or more.

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.

Nowhere on earth has more soul than Detroit.

James Brown is the perfect example of flashy but classy. Classy doesn't have to mean boring. His gear was flamboyant but without being so over the top. The cape was probably the biggest part of his persona. He looked like Superman.