“No matter is going on, I have something for that time or era.”

But at the same time, there’s still a classy side to me that I’ve seen in Oakland as well.

I like to just take all of them and allow them to help me build.

When you have somebody who takes their craft seriously, you don’t have to babysit them and be there all the time.

The influence that Oakland has on my sound is about 90%.

I am so weak over love and heartbreak.

There’s so many different elements to Oakland.

I feel that when you have a passion and you are real.

It’s straight and narrow, you can see the growth and understand that I’m not afraid to give you honesty and be honest about anything that has to do with my story.

I feel like pain is the quickest way to relate to someone because everybody has been through that and everybody has had a heartbreak.

Every time I hit the stage I try to take something from it.

I do my best to tell a story whenever I write music because I want to paint the most vivid picture that tells a story whether a person is falling in love for the first time or going through a painful heartbreak.

I’m one of the artists that even though I love my soulful stuff, I love to turn up and have a good time and that’s another side of me.

It’s the best way for people to get to me know.

It’s honest. I can’t portray to you something that I’ve never been through or something I didn’t watch someone close to me go through.

I feel like it has been lost in R&B and a lot of people are scared to talk about their vulnerabilities and insecurities. They want to keep it up and in the club.

I’m connecting and that’s really what any artist wants at the end of the day which is to connect with their fans and supporters.

We`re seeing something fairly remarkable happen on the political train. We`re seeing the Washington establishment abandoning Marco Rubio. I think they`ve made the determination that Marco can`t win. And they`re rushing to support Donald Trump.

You don’t know what it is to store up a lot of details and then come upon something real.

If I don’t finish in the top three for the next Nobel Peace Prize, something’s seriously wrong.

Talent? What is talent but the ability to get away with something?

After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.

Chemistry is a class you take in high school or college, where you figure out two plus two is 10, or something.

I had an instinctive feeling that the people who have little or no school training should have something coming into their homes weekly which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way… so I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things that concerned our people.

I’m not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul.