Joe Sample was one of my heroes. I met him at the Curacao Jazz festival, and I fanned out like he was the Beatles!

In my opinion, you just have to make the music. Make the music and work as hard as you can to get it out there.

I've never said anything that I didn't want to say on a record, ever.

What I love about Stevie Wonder is the way he makes people feel. He's one of the best examples of how music can heal.

I loved her music and the fact that she was a classically trained pianist and that her voice was so unique, but what made Nina Simone my hero is that I had never seen anyone in the public eye who looked anything like me at all, ever.

I am on an album with theater icon Billy Porter called the 'Soul of Richard Rodgers.' Our duet is called 'Carefully Taught.'

Just to keep myself balanced, I do things like yoga and meditation.

Every once in a while, I find something that I'm interested in just because of the singing, like the Goo Goo Dolls.

I know that I pray a lot, and I take time for myself.

In hindsight, I feel like I made the right decision to choose production that would get played on black radio.

I was born in love with music. My mother is a singer. Many of my aunts and uncles on my mother's side are musical. My grandparents sang and played blues piano. It's literally in my blood.

There's just something creatively fulfilling about watching a movie and writing a song for it because it helps you put on another pair of shoes.

I'm kind of like a folk singer mixed with soul, but I feel like if you really are a lover of hip-hop music, make the beat banging as possible and then put the message in so that people get the honey with the medicine.

I always pray when I write songs that my spirit guides, or whoever is with me, inspiring me, would let me speak the truth.

Your soul is between you and God.

For the first ten years of my career, I felt suffocated. People constantly stood over me while I tried to create. And in 2009, I hit rock bottom. I couldn't find myself because I was looking to be defined by the music industry or by being number one on the Billboard charts.

'Open Door' was a world music project and bilingual. It was in Hebrew and English, and it's great. I do think it's really beautiful. But it's very emotional and very dark - in a good way.

Nina Simone sacrificed so much to be as bold as she was about being black and about being female in an era where that could have cost her life.

So many people have been abused. It's not rare; it's a very common human experience, and we survive.

Saying things on paper that I would never, ever say, and saying things to myself, admitting things to myself, about myself and my personality, just putting it on paper, is how I deal with emotional pain.

With 'Acoustic Soul,' I saw my music as sparse. But I didn't do that because I was making a commitment to be commercial. That's what made 'Acoustic Soul' so difficult to produce. It took 2 1/2 years because I couldn't figure out what I wanted and still be commercial.

I like Brandy a lot. She's a vocal prodigy.

Music lives in my mother - she's played in bands in Detroit and toured and did the whole thing. So I have somebody who's done it all to just talk to. And we write songs together.

Everything in my music has always been emotionally and spiritually motivated... But after I started doing yoga, the place where I came from changed drastically.