I got sent off to my grandmother's for five months and watched a lot of TV and had a lot of grilled cheese with butter on it - because she was English and put lots of butter on everything - and yogurt. The English are big on dairy products, you know? I'd have an earache, and she'd be like, "Here, have some milk." Wonderful woman, but she had kind of screwed-up nutrition ideas.

I'd been knocking on record companies' doors for so long, and I had gone on a lot of auditions. It's weird when you go to those auditions through the Village Voice or something. You never know what to expect. You just press Floor 3 on the elevator and pray that it's not... You know, anyone can place an ad, so it's really freaky.

My mom. She really encouraged me. That's the trouble with education: Unless you have a really supportive parent, you get left behind.

While a lot of my day, like most people's, is spent thinking about me, I can see how it's a universal thing: the competition, the clashes of personality that fuel the world and fill the world, are the exact same ones that take place just between two people. I just think politics is a form, en masse, of human relations.

I feel like you should always be questioning the genre you're doing. If you're doing something that sounds like a lullaby, it can be good to make it about someone stalking someone.

I'm just kind of sick of music. I don't know what I want to do. It's not that I feel suicidal or anything, but I just want to end this life. I just want to be somebody else now. Sometimes I feel like that. You always think, "If I just cut my hair really short and dye it brown and put on a little goatee, no one would know it was me, and I could..."

In terms of content, a lot of rap is crap, with all the sexism and homophobic bullshit. It's incredible how rappers are always preaching nonconformity - you know, "I'm just gonna go my own way and be my own man and blah blah blah" - but they're the first ones to do so many things that they have to do. They have to do that hip-hop thing, a certain way of walking, and it's so conformist.