I'm in a state of my life when the essential is very important to me. I don't like long songs with complicated arrangements and breaks anymore.

I can change the arrangements on stage while I am playing or singing, doing signs to the musicians to change things because the audience is dancing or singing with us. That's the interesting part of the live show, actually, because everything is possible and everything can change.

There are some things around us that are not actually useful. I didn't know that before. It's very new for me to understand. That became my way of writing: I can see also the new myself.

The audiences are really different in general. Even in the same country or in the same city, from one venue to another, the audiences can be totally different.

I think about all these influences and musical cultures, then the opinion of the audience is of course important, but when I'm working on an album or a new project, I'm not all the time thinking about what the audience will think about it.

The interesting thing for me is to put together all my influences and all my experiences I got through my traveling with my father.

Going back and forth between Western Arabic and African countries clearly created the various musical backgrounds I could have and obviously influenced my professional attitude, my way of approaching both music composition and singing, particularly phrasing.