Boys do cry, but I don't think I shed a tear for a good chunk of my teenage years.
I'm extremely compassionate, loving, all of those warm fuzzy things, but the outer shell doesn't project that all the time.
My music definitely comes from a place of experience. Everything connects to a truth.
We were poor. But my mom never accepted that. She worked hard to become a residential contractor - got her master's with honors at the University of New Orleans. I used to go to every class with her. Her father was my paternal figure.
I need to know how many records I've sold, how many album equivalents from streaming, which territories are playing my music more than others, because it helps me in conversations about where we're gonna be playing shows or where I might open a retail location, like a pop-up store or something.
I respect Drake not only as a creative person but as a business mind as well. I think Drake's important.
Super-envious of the fact that Daft Punk can wear robot helmets and be one of the most famous bands in the world, while also understanding that will never be my situation.
It's not essential for me to have a big debut week; it's not essential for me to have big radio records.
I have no delusions about my likability in every scenario. I know that in order to get things done the way you want them, oftentimes your position will be unpopular.
I'm in this business to be creative - I'll even diminish it and say to be a content provider.
I grew up in New Orleans. I had just moved into my dorm at the University of New Orleans, and I was doing laundry, and my mom called me, like, 'We've got to evacuate. There's a hurricane's coming.'
A friend of mine jokes that I have a painstaking royalty complex. Like maybe I was a duke in a past life.
Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited - that has music and rhythm and time.
The first four and a half years was me in the studio every day, writing songs for other people. I had jobs, too - eleven jobs. I worked at Kinko's, Fatburger, Subway - I was a sandwich artist - and I was a claims processor at Allstate Insurance.
Some people focus more on sonics. Some people focus more on story. I focus on both sonics and story, but music sometimes, just music itself, can turn into more of a maths problem. I guess everything in life is a math problem, but it can be more about an empirical route to getting the symmetry that you want, and this vibe, sonically.
How we experience memory sometimes, it's not linear. We're not telling the stories to ourselves. We know the story; we're just seeing it in flashes overlaid.
As a lifestyle you always being the focal point is innately unhealthy.
Because I'm not in a record deal, I don't have to operate in an album format.
I can operate in half-a-song format.
I've gotten used to being Frank Ocean.
