“My first album was completed in three months.”

Fame is a very strange animal.

Los Angeles can be a really sad city.

I’m trying to be a singer, not a civil rights leader.

I was looking for something and I wasn’t sure what it was. [After experimenting with] certain funguses,

I breeze through Twitter – I look at the mentions, the pictures, the videos.

Fantasy is so much hotter than reality most of the time.

There’s always gonna be people that are scared of it. But at the end of the day you give those bullies, those people, that are so ignorant, if you give them the power to affect you, you’re letting them win.

When you dance and move around it creates a different reaction from the audience – they love it.

I want to upset people, I want to make people think, I want to keep people interested.

Conforming is not cool. Embracing who you are and what makes you different is actually what’s really cool.

I have crushes on women all the time.

I’ve sung other people’s music all my life.

The biggest risk I’ve ever taken is going on American Idol and trying to be myse

I am gay, and I’m very comfortable with it.

Carving out an identity for yourself is important so I’m trying to do that as well.

I wanted the focus to be on my ability as a singer and as an entertainer – not on my private life.

I always wanted to be on tour or making albums.

It wasn’t necessary to speak on the recession, you know what I mean, but I just though it made a lot of sense. I was like, “okay, cool,” I’m going to go with this approach for the name of the album [ The Recession].

I don’t think if you set out to make an album to get a bunch of Grammy nominations… you just have to set out to make an album you’ll really love.

My dreams as a kid were so far below the Grammys, like, maybe selling out a show, or, like, seeing your album on a shelf in an Urban Outfitters… and the Grammys are so far above that. It’s very ridiculous.

All the albums that I grew up listening to were produced by one person.

I wanted to make an album that melodically people can connect to; something that reflects our times and the kinds of difficulties we face.

I’m not the ‘rappity-rapper’ type dude. All my music is really true. I can’t just rap about nothing, just metaphors and putting words together. I can’t just smash out material like other guys. I just want my albums to be crazy every time I drop one.

I realized at a young age that sequence in an album is almost as important as the songs that are on the album.