If I’d known white people were going to buy my last album, I never would have recorded it.
I believe God will make a way.
My parents had a love for music. There were so many records, so much music constantly being played. My mother played piano, my father sang, and we were always surrounded in music.
The honor to me has less to do with the award. To me that translates in the relationship that I have with the audience, and if my music is helpful to them, that’s the award.
The work is constant. There’s a time for rest, but I don’t believe in getting comfortable just because everyone says you’ve arrived.
We should constantly be aspiring to reach higher and higher and higher. We should never be comfortable where we are.
With the things that I love, I tried to put a couple seeds, a bunch of seeds in the ground and see what sprung up. Sometimes it was acting and sometimes it was music. But whatever it was I continued to plant.
I think the work ethic that was established in my family was something very important. If you plant the seed, if you sow sparingly and reap sparingly. If you sow in abundance you’ll reap in abundance.
If you love something and if you’re committed and diligent – the things happen!
If I never won a Grammy, I would be satisfied, if in fact I could help people. I don’t say that because it sounds like something cool to say.
I didn’t have that intense ambition to be a musician or an actress. I just enjoyed it. And by enjoying it, because I loved it, it enabled me to get better at what I was doing, because there was a love behind it.
I’ve leaned on God for so long. “Hey, God, you just gave me this gift, and I’m just going to go out there and sing.” But I’m realizing how much larger and how expansive my gift becomes when I actually pay attention to it and try to practice and try to perfect it.
I try not to have a day pass where I don’t read something from the Bible. It’s like my sustenance to me.
Love and this close-knit family structure really helped to give me the confidence. To know that you have family to go back to is a help. It doesn’t always happen biologically. Sometimes God gives you family in other forms, but I was very blessed. I have a very strong biological family.
I’m making music for other people to listen to for pleasure. And hopefully, later on maybe they’ll listen to it and go, “That bass line, boy, did you hear the way those drums interacted with that?”
I rarely listen to the music for the sheer pleasure. I’m listening for the tool, I’m listening for the instrument, I’m listening for the art.
Everything takes place in a season. There was a season when that’s all I did was listen to the music. Now I’m just in a place where I don’t listen, I create. And if I do listen there are specific things that I listen to, and for specific reasons.
I don’t listen to a lot of music at all. I think that’s very bizarre too, because it was such a comfort zone for me. But I don’t know if I had my fill, but I don’t listen to a lot of music, because I’m creating it.
I was very active. I was always all over the place trying to do a million things, just into this activity. If you asked me when I was 14 what I wanted to be: “Activist, first, is my occupation. I am an activist.”
My mother has all my awards, because if I walked downstairs every day and saw all my achievements it would be so easy to become complacent.
If everyone is a product of this society, who will say the things that need to be said, and do the things that need to be done, without compromise? Truth will never start out popular in a world more concerned with marketability than righteousness. It will initially suffer ridicule and even violence- yet ultimately it is undeniable. All of humanity is living in a dream world, but suffering real consequences.