Hip-hop to me right now is really easy listening. It's very easy listening, like there's nothing abrasive about it. There's no album that I put in my car that makes me roll down the windows - all the windows - and ride past the club line three times before I get out the car.

I didn't come in as a writer that found producers, I came in under producers. So I've always respected the actual production process and producers in general.

I don't ever want anyone to hear my music and look at it as just gratuitous violence, or hustling and money-getting - I try to tell the perspective of the woman, the man, the mind, why.

As a writer, you have a huge ego. You think that every line means something to everybody the same way it means to you. And that's not true.

Sonically, musicians always go above and beyond in our efforts to disrupt radio. It's always about being different. Our radio is never conventional anyway.

For me, I was born in the Bronx, and I moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia at a very young age. I had the luxury of going back to New York, visiting my grandmother who would spoil me endlessly, and I could buy whatever was the hot kicks in the summertime of 1990. Being able to shop and then going back to Virginia Beach, where they weren't as fast in regards to fashion, I had that luxury.

I try to make Play Cloths really representative of me and my designers they look at my evolution as an artist and in fashion and they [zero] in to different details. I come into the office some days and they're like, 'What are those?" [I say,] "[These] are Philip Lim...[I'll] have on Philip Lim sweats and they go and put their spin on it.