That's the beautiful thing about being an artist, is you can take risks and take chances and hopefully be secure enough to just keep going with it if you fall flat on your face.
In my early days, I was about 145 pounds. I was really a starving artist; the poster child for starving artists.
I wasn't a Prince fan until I watched Purple Rain. When I watched that, it was one of my favorite movies of all time because it shows the life of an artist.
Life is different than it was in the Nineties. I'm a dad, and there are other things I have to get done in an afternoon than just being an artist.
Even though I'm a pop singer, I really have more the life of a country singer.
I do a few shows every year, but I'm mostly at home, making music. Day and night.
Yo get a real job. Rappin doesn't pay the rent, I hate the studio cause that's where all my money went.
When I started I'd fly across the country to do a gig for a hundred bucks.
You're always taught that the world is so competitive. You're taught that it's not very likely for you to become successful and that odds are you're going to be a struggling artist for the rest of your life.
I'll read on Twitter, 'Do you still do music?' Music is all I do, all day.
When I first got started, I used to say I just want to stay in the studio, I want to make good music, I want to sing my heart out, and I didn't think I'd have people following me to a grocery store or following me home or stuff like that.
I'm always on tour, so I'm always trying new tracks out live before they're released. That's more necessity than anything, because I don't get a proper chance to sit in a studio and work on tracks like other producers do.
The years keep going by and you realize, Wow. Doing these records is such a process: going on tour for a year and a half, then you get home and you want to do other things.
Every song I put on a record could be a single and I just pack my bags for it... and the minute it takes off, I'm not gonna be home for a while.
I enter my studio at 9 a.m. I have lunch here, I return right away to my work and I go out to dinner at 8 p.m. My daily tasks vary very much.
I lived there [ in New York City] as an artist, but never as a Chinese artist.
I feel like I've spent the majority of my time touring and traveling, so if I reduced the actual time making music, it's probably four and a half years at the most.
Usually when my music drops, I can go to my hood, I can hear people playing it. Now it comes from performing it, people knowing it and stuff. It's crazy!
I've got a lot of songs about having fun and partying, but it's a lot of work.
I've always felt that music is an art form that deserves to live the life of the artist.
When I'm up on stage, I'm thinking more about my fans and about myself as a singer and an artist. When I'm at home being a daddy, the last thing I'm thinking about is being an artist. It is two things that I never really put together.
I feel like I've spent the last five years of my life on the road. It hasn't affected my songs but it's probably affected everything else about me. Obviously, the more you travel, the wilder the things that keep happening to you, the more likely it is you'll get complete strangers knocking on your hotel room door.
I was 100 percent political in the '80s - the first time around, let's call it, my first life as an artist.
When someone is a musician - trying to make a living off being a public figure - it's really easy for people to see me as a face on a screen that doesn't have a personal life.
Is an artist much more than a beggar?
