Throughout my years in From First to Last, I was always dabbling and making electronic music on my own time. The first records I ever owned were crossover electronic rock, like Prodigy, Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails.
You can't do gospel and rap. Either you're of the gospel music, or you're a rapper. You can't put the two together. You can, but is it right? It's questionable.
I'd say I am a nice cross of R&B and Pop.
I'm of the generation that discovered Aerosmith because of Run-DMC. They just looked crazy to me. They were the dudes in the Run-DMC video. That's who Aerosmith was.
It's been really cool to me to watch someone like Sam Hunt, whose lyrics and roots are in country but you can hear that he listens to Drake and Justin Timberlake - and that's OK. It allows songwriters to be more honest because it's like, 'This is who I'm listening to.'
I just take rock songs and mix it with hip-hop and a little bit of R&B.
I can just be a Christian who sings mainstream music instead of having to be a Christian who has to somehow just sing Christian music.
When I lived in Nashville, Tanya Tucker and people like that were coming up, and I'm sure that Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette were going, 'What's that noise? That's not country.' It's always been this battle where whoever comes up behind the reigning stars isn't country enough. There really is a lot more crossover now.
I do think that some bands seem to be dabbling in the rock-hip-hop world and are not necessarily serious about it.
I really hope that with my album, because I have a bit more of a mainstream crossover following, I really hope that I can introduce some new listeners to this world of instrumental music.
'90s fashion is awesome. Best of both worlds - you had power pop, like the Spice Girls and Shampoo. But then you had Nirvana and Hole. And you also had '90s dance music like N-Trance, who kind of blended both.
Soul was the music made by and for black people. For most of the Sixties it was thoroughly divorced from white popular music, but by the end of the decade several artists with their roots firmly in both soul and R&B traditions had crossed over.
They believed you can't mix rock, country, and rap, and that crossover is dead. I always knew it would work. And it will always work as long as you're really into it and like what you're doing.
I've got a superstar like Usher singing bachata, a tune featuring Lil Wayne. I'm offering people more than just bachata. That captures a new audience that would listen to bachata because Usher is singing.
Where do you even draw the line between genres?
Barriers have been broken: rappers are singing, and singers are rapping. You might catch a rapper on a rock song, a pop artist on a hip-hop song - there are so many different things that are going on today. That is the same way in which we live our lives; we're all over the place. I like to try different things.
I've been criticized for doing so - crossover music. But I never claimed to be a pure dancehall artist.
The folk music definition has changed in this fast music world and musical styles are blending really quickly.
I'm this strange kind of fusion of jazz, pop, and R&B.
My aim is to bridge Broadway and the R&B world; and to bring all my Broadway experience to the R&B world; and one day, when I go back to Broadway, to bring some R&B to that.
My dream collaboration would be with someone like Bjork, Kate Bush, or even Dionne Warwick.
I worked with different producers from all genres, trying to bridge different styles of music, from urban to electronica to ballads.
For Bobby and I to sing R&B and sound black was probably the stupidest thing we could do. White radio stations wouldn't play us because they thought we were black. Black stations wouldn't play us because they thought we were white. Any time you break ground, you go against the grain.
Three-6 Mafia, we were always doing different kinds of things, and we like rock music, we like whatever - not saying they was rock, but they had a little rock-n-roll with some of their music, a little rock with it.
I have tried to show the influence of folk music in Bollywood, in Tamil movies, in Telugu cinema.
