I try to be genuine. I try to be real. It's such a subjective thing, but I try to convey an emotion.

I always felt like I could combine good pop songs that are easy for people to like with a real person and a real mind and integrity.

Sometimes I write songs that just come out in a pop format because I grew up on melody and these amazing artists during the 80s. It's my tradition and it's something that I can't really control.

I'm maybe not so anxious to be a successful pop artist. Of course I want people to like my music, but I know what the price of success can be, too. Basically, I'm happy as long as I can keep my freedom, so I'm so happy with the way things are at the moment. I get to be hands-on with details in every aspect of what I'm doing, but I also get to perform for a big audience.

I wondered what things what things became when you no longer needed them, and I wondered what the future would hold once we'd gotten past our personal tragedies and proven them ultimately survivable.

The way I figured it, keeping quiet was safe. Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinating didn't exactly overlap with my friends.

Prince is king to me. As this half-naked, short black guy who looked like a girl in the 70s and 80s, he was talking about women in a way that was very unusual because he didn't objectify them.