I really look up to Louis C.K. I think he's great. And obviously he's very popular, more popular than me. Years ago, I was thinking, naively, it would be great to be that popular. And then I thought about it and then I realized that, with his money and his level of notoriety, he has all of the same emotions that I do.

I didn't give myself enough love, so I was searching for it in other places, and it was a never ending struggle.

If my career was a basketball season, I'm in the pre-season still. I'm not blowing everybody out by 40 - there's so much work to be done, and there's no time to really sit and look back and be proud of what I've done yet, because it's the pre-season still.

I made a CD in my dorm room and put it on the Internet, and my friends blew it up. Within a few months, I was doing shows across the country without a record deal, without a single, without anything.

When I was a kid, my parents were always like, 'Money doesn't buy happiness.' I thought, 'You just didn't make enough money.' I had to go find it out for myself.

I remember being 24 in Los Angeles. And up until that moment, when my mom would call my cell phone and it would ring, I would be flushed with some sort of excitement that we all have - a little dopamine rush, when my phone rings - and I'd look down, and it would say, 'Mom.' It used to feel like a job to pick that up.

When you know it's a game, you can have more fun playing it. When things seem serious, you tend to take less risk and have less fun.

I realized I could do music for the sake of music, not the other things that come with it. That was a major shift.

Just be yourself and be upfront about your expectations and desires. Don't be ambiguous and play hard to get. It doesn't work. You'll end up in the friend zone.

My songs are all personal.

I know it sounds corny, but I look for a girl that has a beautiful personality on the inside.

I realized that a lot of people in my family had sacrificed for me to have the opportunity to go to a place like Duke. I owed it to them to finish. I graduated with a 3.6.

When I recorded 'Cooler Than Me', I had been singing for like, three months at the most. I was just a producer experimenting with my voice on tracks, and now I'm, like, a really good singer in a legit way.

If a song about blowing your shot becomes popular, that's really funny.

When I started picking out music for myself, I was a hip-hop kid. DMX, The Roots, Outkast, people like that.

I believe in the ethos of the remix, like Andy Warhol making a painting of a Campbell's soup label.

If anyone has listened to my stuff over the years, they know I tend not to do the same thing twice.

I looked at myself and realized I had a lot of boundaries up about what I would talk about, what was private for me and what wasn't. I decided to just get rid of them. It was quite liberating.

I co-produced 'Boyfriend' by Justin Bieber and worked on Labrinth's album, so I've been keeping busy.

It's easier to make art for a society at a certain point in time with an understanding of what's going on.

I've remixed lots of other people's songs, from Adele to Electric Light Orchestra to Beyonce, so when my record label said, 'Why don't you give 'Ibiza' to someone to remix?' I said, 'Sure,' because I like the idea of people reimagining art and making something new out of it.

It's like, we all grow up thinking it would be so nice to have hundreds of people falling over themselves trying to grab us, telling us we're great, that they love us.

In my short career, I tend not to repeat myself. I have no interest in redoing something. Sometimes that makes people angry, and maybe it's not the best thing for me commercially. But it's the best thing for me artistically, and it's the best thing for my heart.

I'm kind of like a rapper trapped in a singer's body.