The music that I listen to the most is probably world music, whether it's from African or South America or all over.

I went to this boy's choir school when I was growing up, and I think that the first time that I consciously started making music was when this one kid joined our class. He was an amazing pianist and would come up with all these ideas. I've always had a really competitive side, so I saw him doing that, and was like, "I have to try writing songs as well."

I was extremely frustrated, almost at the point of giving up on coming up with a name for the project (because I'm awful at it), when I decided to play the 'put a pen somewhere on a map with your eyes closed' game with South Africa. About the 5th try was St. Lucia in South Africa, which coincidentally also happens to be an idyllic sub-tropical seaside resort town. The name seemed to fit with the mood of the music, and so after a while it just stuck.

We lived in a suburb in Johannesburg, which is a massive city of about 8 million people, and my parents would drive me to school every day and over the weekend I would go to the mall and then occasionally on Safari. Pretty normal stuff, apart from the Safari.

I decided to create a really good laptop recording situation and to learn how to write that way, rather than have the perfect stuff around.

The racial conversation in the States is so multifaceted and multilayered. Obviously it's not always a positive conversation, but it's just so much more detailed than it was when I was growing up in South Africa.

As a visual arts teacher, I have to keep my mind open. I have explores styles from pointillism to cubism.