In my experience, as a young black artist, you have to fulfill an archetype, or be a token - and I was unwilling to do that.

You just have to know that the more successful you get as an artist, the less of a normal life you have. It's a trade-off.

I have always had tremendous respect for my sister as an artist, as a woman, and now as a mother.

Every teenage artist out there is mostly talking about boys, and I think there's so much more to being a teenager than just boys.

You get educated by traveling.

I still stand behind the stuff I did early on, but I was on a record label, and I didn't have a lot of creative control. Another side of that is just being young and having bad taste. There was plenty of that, too.