When you lose someone that's really important to you, I feel like it's something that never really goes away. It's almost learning how to live with an empty feeling; it's weird. Something's always missing, but you kind of get used to it.

Making music was always a big interest for me.

I studied a lot from bossa nova, and I used to listen to it a lot as a kid because my mum would play it. I even wanted to learn Portuguese in high school so I could sing in it.

Conexao,' which means 'connection' in Portuguese, is about exploring the more nuanced highs and lows of romance.

I grew up in a military family, and there's something about that military-style uniform, all cleaned up, a brutal control effort the military necessarily breeds.

As a family, we didn't get into the celebrity thing. That's not what we wanted for the boys. We wanted them to play everything they could, be involved in as many school events as they could.

I say to my mother all the time, 'You're the child.' And she says, 'Yeah, you're the mother.' I've been that way with her since I was 11.

We're a competitive family - we compete in everything we do: playing cards; if we're walking down the street, we want to be the first one down the block.