All my achievements have been great achievements. I have been collaborating with big names and making hits - like my song 'Yosemite' with Travis Scott.
I'd like to do a completely off-the-wall collaboration. I would like one of my songs to be the hook to a rap song. That would be so much fun!
If you're going to write a song, try to get together with a collaborator because it's better to write with collaborators.
Why is it that I can remember so easily the lyrics to the opening theme song of 'Gilligan's Island?' Why do I remember these trivial things, and I can't remember the names of important collaborators?
The beautiful thing about hip-hop is it's like an audio collage. You can take any form of music and do it in a hip-hop way and it'll be a hip-hop song. That's the only music you can do that with.
When I was a kid, when I was 16, 17, I'd come home from high school, and my dad collected all of Barbra Streisand's records. And she was very young then. I think she probably had three records out, and she was 21, and we had them all. And I knew every single song, every breath, every elision, every swell. And I sang along to it.
I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.
I know the video platform so, so, so well. I know the perfect mixture of how comedic a piece has to be, what the video has to be like, what the song has to sound like, to make it successful.
I released a song called 'Let Em Know' off SoundCloud, and some fan commented on it and was like, 'Trap soul movement,' and I was like, 'Man, that's dope. What is that?' And it just sounded like my music. That was the perfect word to describe my music, so I was just like, I'm going to call my project that.
I listen to a lot of music. One of my favorite songs is 'Final Song' by M. It's something that I listen to before a lot of competitions.
Putting out compilation records, buying the right to music is incredibly complicated. You have to find the writer of the song and the publisher of the song - not the singer - and make two separate deals.
I'm still not entirely sure how 'Pretty Girl' blew up the way it did. It wasn't really meant to. The song was originally meant for a compilation tape for a magazine called 'The Le Sigh', and I made the video in about 30 minutes.
Success isn't dependent on the market place, because I can't control that. It's about completing a good song.
I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.
'Chamalkay' is an old Guyanese slang word. It means a 'young mischievous girl.' It's not derogatory, but it isn't over complimentary, either. It was probably a word I just Googled one day, and the song kind of played into the feel of that.
As a musician myself, I wouldn't be confident if I received some other composers' song, because I choose to express myself through the music that I make.
When it comes to sitting down and composing, there is no hesitation, no concern, no critics breathing fire down my neck. For me, writing a song is the purest part of all. No one can mess with that.
On 'Metallica,' I recorded six or seven different guitar solos for almost every song, took the best aspects of each solo, mapped out a master solo and made a composite. Then I learned how to play the composite solo, tightened it up and replayed it for the final version.
'Gorilla Man' is a composite of a few individuals, but the song itself was actually inspired by James Taylor. I spied his 'Gorilla' album laying on my floor and in some altered state, instantly started singing the chorus. It was fun to write. There's an old notebook with at least three more verses in it somewhere.
You know, I always when people ask me, like, what is my most favorite song, I quote Duke Ellington, when they would ask him, what's his favorite composition? And I say, I haven't written it yet. Because, you know, there are different songs for different occasions.
