I was probably just graduating high school, maybe still in high school. When I was still in high school, maybe the last two years, I was rapping but I wasn't telling anybody. When I signed my deal people didn't know it was the same Ryan Montgomery from Oak Park High School, because I used to play basketball and I used to fight. Like I'd bring boxing gloves to school. So when they found out, it was, "You mean Ryan who be boxing?" or, "Ryan who be hopping up at the park?" So I was known as that guy.

It's just an inspiring journey in itself to stop drinking this late in my career after abusing alcohol and to have this kind of success so late when usually people give you like this window of success time.

Hip-hop culture itself has completely consumed everything involved in entertainment. When you think about basketball like the way those guys dress; I don't know if you notice but people care about how you dress these days.

I feel think the next logical step is acting, which I think is cool but I never got the acting bug. I never looked at a movie and thought "I wanna act," but after seeing that play I thought, "I wanna write a movie, and I wanna write a play." I will write a movie and I will write a play.

"Tabernacle" was probably the easiest song I'd ever wrote because all I really had to do was rhyme the words since the whole story, front to back, was already in my head. All I needed to do was verbalize it, and if it didn't have to rhyme I could've just freestyled it because I already knew what I wanted to say.

Imagine Eminem writing a play with complex raps and syllables, and melodies flowing in and out. That's what it was like for me listening to Lin-Manuel Miranda, it was incredible. So it just goes to show that if you put your teaching style in a certain form, that will attract the attention of the people you are trying to teach.

My big brother used to come home drunk and he'd clash with my dad and I just didn't want that.