Brandy is one of my favorite vocalists. Jay-Z is my favorite emcee outside of Biggie.

AC/DC, Def Leppard, Alice Cooper - I learned stories of all these guys. That's when I fell in love with Queen, which is one of my favorite bands of all time... I started paying attention to what made music good. I started paying attention to why I liked it.

When you're an artist, you can only do your own stuff. Even if you only write for other people, you're really more focused on yourself. So while everybody's out touring, I'm working on records.

I don't believe in writing people off.

Not to be arrogant, but I have a lot of hits, so my phone stay ringing, but it's consistent.

I don't have the desire to just keep every record and put it out. That's not what I do. I make records for people; that's why I just continue to be consistent, where a lot of the other top writers, they kind of fell off because they started focusing on their own careers as artists. That's not where my head is at.

It's a gift that I have and I became good at it. When I heard my first song I didn't even know that I could write songs.