To me it's very important to be a leader not a follower. Sometimes it takes balls and heart to do that. Sometimes it's not that east to say.

They look at me and say how come you're winning? You came back from the dead three years ago, and you're already killing it. I mean I came back from the dead. Thanks to my family and thanks to Kevin Zinger and my brother Evidence and Rocko, especially my blood family and the guys in Swollen Members. I wouldn't even be here today if it wasn't for those people.

If you ever get to a wall, you just got to break that wall down and keep going, and I feel like I have come up with some conceptual songs that will really connect with people and that is something that I have been showing and improving my lyrical ability so much that I came to this realization that I also want to make music that people can connect with.

You have to understand for my whole life I have been romanticized by this other side of the fence. This whole darker, egotistically, sort of mean world. I fully embraced that world and three or four years ago I completely walked away from that world, literally.

I don't go and ask my friends for favours. They are real, true, incredible amazing human beings with good hearts. They have evolved as human beings. I have evolved as a human being and I have let this wall down that I had.

Say an A&R person wants me to do this type of song because they feel it is going to work on the radio, I guarantee you that unless the song is real, there is nothing wrong with having success and I want to be successful. That is why I am, but I do it my own way.

I'm extremely proud of what I have achieved. I've travelled around the world twice, went from rolling quarters for cigarettes, balling my eyes out, wondering what I was going to do after losing three million dollars, to being very financially comfortable, to buying a Mercedes G Wagon to being able to get whatever I want and living in a beautiful apartment in West Hollywood, furnished exactly how I want it. Life is incredible.