I love making music so its important for me to keep doing that even if the schedule is busy.

Finding out that Ray Charles sang country songs but it sounded as soulful as any rhythm and blues record that kind of opened up my horizons for what songwriting was and what singers I could listen to.

Listening to a lot of guitar rock and roll music and feeling quite eccentric because everyone expected me to learn and develop like R&B. This kind of made me feel a little bit better, because I realized it was all the same, you know. There's no difference. It's just music.

The worst thing for a singer/songwriter is to run out of songs.

I remember listening to like gospel-y blues tunes. I'd just listen to the rhythm and the music was upbeat. Always upbeat if you get like a good rhythm you can nod your head. You just feel good. But then when you listen to the lyrics it was quite sad.

With writing music and writing songs and recording music and coming up with stuff, you need to kind of reengage that kind of inner child to come up with interesting perceptions.

By that point, I was about 12, 13 years old. I was this young black kid into rock music, which was kind of strange. People would always assume I'd be into like more modern R&B, which is a stereotype, but that was kind of what was expected. And I had all these guitar magazines of all these musicians that didn't look like me. So I assumed Jimmi Hendrix was one of those.