I pride myself on being the type of artist who can work half in the R&B world and half in the pop world.

If you want to be successful, you have to be the best person doing it. And in order to be the best person doing it, you have to get your work ethic right and keep going.

I don't want to call myself a perfectionist because perfection is imperfection.

I want to write for people that are trying to do some kind of quality music. What I mean by quality music is not so much the trend, what is hot right now. I don't write trendy, I write what feels good and something that feels good will never get old. Timeless music is what I try to shoot for.

Every song I've ever written has been based in reality, based in fact, things that happen to me.

I have my diehard R&B fans on one side of the spectrum and my diehard pop and dance fans on the other side of the spectrum.

There wasn't a lot of R&B cats doing songs at 120 beats per minute before 'Closer,' which I take full credit and responsibility for. That's all good, but it was an experiment. You experiment with something, if it goes good, cool, but you never forget where you come from and R&B is where I come from.