I have no confidence issues with the impact or the quality of the music. No one in hip-hop, before this point and to this point, with all due respect, has done this.
People looked at me - people still look at me - as 'this is Gucci Mane's producer.' But the music that me and Future put together was so different than what me and Gucci do, it just made people look at the music like, 'Hold on - Zaytoven is the real deal.'
I had T-Pain on one of my singles before anyone really knew of him. I was the first one to put that to life of having T-Pain on the hook.
When I was studying... there weren't any black concert pianists. My choices were intuitive, and I had the technique to do it. People have heard my music and heard the classic in it, so I have become known as a black classical pianist.
I listen to a lot of artists like Tori Amos, Cherry Glazerr, and Patti Smith, and I kind of wanted to follow in their footsteps, or at least try to be that genre-defining.
With Soapkills, we were lucky. We started at a time of transition where things were not ready, nothing was available.
A lot of my peers, be seniors or juniors, they'll text me or they'll call me and they'll say, 'Thank you for doing the music that you do because it pushes the genre forward in different ways.' It's a very rewarding thing to hear.
Ain't nobody gonna come from where I come from, keep it real as I did and make it with the local Detroit sound that has never made it in the industry before. Where I'm going, I don't feel like too many people from my city are going to blaze this trail.
