My Umi said shine your light on the world, shine your light for the world to see

To me, it's like happiness is about happiness, but happiness is a fight.

I'm an independent thinker. And I'm not the poster child for any movement. I'm trying to support whatever's right no matter where it is.

I'm growing as an individual, but your always growing. All of my albums are snapshots of where I am artistically.

I guess something that you love to do, you gotta ease up off it and give it a little space, come back and be fresh to it.

To me, the job of the artist is to provide a useful and intelligent vocabulary for the world to be able to articulate feelings they experience everyday, and otherwise wouldn't have the means to express in a meaningful and useful way.

In the early '90s, when I really started to find my voice, I was reading a lot of books, and I was moved by the writers, like Chinua Achebe, and I wanted to be able to write rhymes that were as potent as what I was reading.