How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.

I feel like the downfall of any person is the second an artist starts celebrating their work themselves, that becomes problematic.

It's funny, I can see the science in how music is made with other artists, but it's hard for me to dissect my own thing.

I've come to the conclusion that the average person can do about four things a day, like four real things a day.

What I'm slowly realizing is that I believe that most of us felt that we could relax a little bit after November 2, 2008, because of the progress and the spirit that it took to get Barack Obama in The White House. And what we didn't realize, is that was really the beginning. That was really the beginning of the struggle and not the end of a struggle, to come from colonial times through slavery, through the Jim Crowe Laws, through the civil rights period to The White House as, like a point A/point B journey. Point B of course being the end.

At the end of the day, I don't release any records that I'm not proud to put my name on. I never got to that point.

Classical music requires an immense amount of concentration, and I don't know if I would've been that committed to that particular life.