Finally, I've reached a place where if I'm working with an artist, they allow me to just do whatever I feel. Growing up, it was like, 'We want another 'Peaches and Cream.' Then you realise... why would you want a 2001 Mercedes Benz when I'm making 2018 Benzes?

My first significant break was when I was 15, going on 16, and my cousin Courtney 'Bear' Sills told me you can make a career out of writing songs. He was the one who put me in with 112. The first song I did with 112 was 'We Can Do It Anywhere.'

Back in the Nineties, I was in an R&B group. I signed my first record deal when I was 12.

Being genuinely humble and being myself has helped me succeed in my career.

When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, and on the whole, I'm writing to that drum rather than the psychological process.

The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.

Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation.

Kids are naturally inventive and curious and creative, but most adults have had that beaten out of them. Writing is a form of play; you have to get rid of all those internal censors that we adults have, the things that say, 'Don't go there, that's not allowed.'