“As a person, I have a lot of different sides to me, and I genuinely just embrace them. I don’t think, ‘Oh, I gotta put on my cool face now!’”
“I’m the kind of person who doesn’t wait for opportunities to fall from the sky.”
“It’s never one solitary event that has changed my life. It’s a bunch of little pieces that built and built up to where I am now.”
“I take my craft seriously, of course, but I don’t feel the need to always play a certain character or a certain part or persona. I’m not going to cut something out of my life because it’s not ‘my image.’ I want to be open enough that if I love something, I can do it, and it will add to myself as an entertainer.”
“I feel like, at the end of the day, I always would try to make music that I wanted to listen to: stuff that I liked and wanted to hear.”
“The earliest you can play Christmas music is on Thanksgiving.”
“I think, in general, more women need to be involved in music and in the industry – that’s been an issue.”
“My dad was a theater actor, so he had an agent, and he brought me into his agency when I was maybe four years old. That was how I started. I started modeling, and it progressed from there.”
“I was in my first movie when I was five. I just loved to entertain and put on a show.”
“Because everybody always encouraged me to sing, I assumed that I wasn’t bad at it. It felt like it was obvious what I was going to pursue. I thought I was good for as long as I can remember.”
“For me, I prefer to work on my own. I feel like I can tap into a more genuine place, and I feel like my best stuff comes from writing on my own in my own zone.”
“I love to act and put on a show, but you’re playing a character all the time. For music, it’s really just me being myself.”
“It’s important for me to put out things that I think are good – I want to be a fan of my own stuff. I also want my live shows to be really awesome, and dance is such an important element for me and my performances.”
“I was in a competing company and have been dancing since I was four – ballet, tap, jazz, hip hop – so it’s a huge part of my life and my music.”
“My music is a direct reflection of the eclectic person I am. I don’t like to be stuck in an R&B box.”
“I want people to know that I’m a force to be reckoned with.”
“If you’re a creative person, what inspires you is always changing; it’s always shifting.”
“My dad’s from Zimbabwe, and my mom is Danish, Irish, and Norwegian, so I have influences from a lot of different places.”
“I’m always about having integrity with my fans and staying true to what I say.”
“The priority for me is just to make music that people can connect with. I want to make something fresh that people may not understand.”
“I’m the type of person that doesn’t like to wait for people to do things for me, and I never want to feel stuck. Why sit around and be like, ‘I wish my label would book me some studio time,’ if I can just buy my own studio equipment and figure out how to run Pro Tools and record it myself?”
“For most artists, you take what you have and who you are, and then you expand on it to make it more entertaining. Everyone knows actors aren’t the same people that they play in movies, but people somehow expect musicians to be a certain way all the time!”
“The craziest part of being on tour is being overseas and having crazed fans so far away from home. They don’t speak English, but they still know the lyrics. That’s a trip.”
“To break R&B into subcategories does a disservice to the music. I like to live in a zone where I can do whatever I want, where I don’t have to worry about genre.”
“Fashion is an extension of expressing who you are. I love to entertain and put on a show. And that’s definitely a part of that.”
“Part of the reason I fell in love with dance so early was because of people like Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, and Britney Spears. When they would dance onstage and in their videos, that was huge for me. I lived for that.”
“Dance has always just been an extension of music for me. It’s about putting my music into motion. It’s just another dimension that I tap into with my music that not many artists do anymore.”
“My tunnel vision work ethic is very hard to come by, I believe. I have had an unwavering faith in myself and my career for as long as I can remember.”
“The only thing that’s better in a group versus being by yourself is the companionship. You have to do a lot of thing by yourself as a solo artist. But it’s cool. It’s worth it.”
“I love fashion. For me, it’s always interesting because I like to be able to mix up different styles and different brands, kind of like how my music taste or personality is. There’s lots of influences.”
“I think my ultimate fashion icon would have to be Gwen Stefani. I love her persona; I love what she embodies and represents. I love the fact that she was a girl fronting a band of boys in No Doubt.”
“I really love ‘Pocahontas.’ Today I was watching ‘Aladdin.’ It’s a classic; you can’t beat it.”
“We are so caught up in our media, in our jobs, in our gossip, and in our consuming that we genuinely feel like we don’t have the time or energy to bother ourselves with the tribulations of nations near and far.”
“This… is a synthetic world many of us live in today – a dream, if you will.”
“There was never really a Plan B for me – I always wanted to be a music artist.”
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