I think Ray Charles did as much as anybody when he did his country music album. Ray Charles broke down borders and showed the similarities between country music and R&B.

I believe that music is another form of news. Music is another form of journalism to me so I have to cover all the areas with my album.

Country fans need to support country music by buying albums and concert tickets for traditional artists or the music will just fade away. And that would be really sad.

I don't think I'd ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

I'm a big collector of vinyl - I have a record room in my house - and I've always had a huge soundtrack album collection. So what I do as I'm writing a movie is go through all those songs trying to find good songs for fights or good pieces of music to layer into the film.

I can see that if this was an album done 10 or 15 years ago we could see we were moving on to some place else.

I was a huge fan of comedy and movies and TV growing up and I was able to memorize and mimic a lot of things not realizing that that meant I probably wanted to be an actor. I just really really amused myself and my friends with memorizing entire George Carlin or Steve Martin albums.

I want to be around for a long time singing and making albums and movies.

Movies for adults sucked in the 1980s and music for adults sucked even worse whether we're talking about Kathleen Turner flicks or Sting albums the decade's non-teen culture has no staying power at all.

Hip-hop don't have no fresh energy none at all. It's money driven everybody tryin' to make that cheque nobody putting art in their albums any more.

A development deal is where they're giving you recording time and money to record but not promising that they'll put an album out.

My mother kept asking me 'When are you going to do a gospel album?' And I've always wanted to do a gospel album. Everybody was going on about it so mom started hounding me more.

I have lots of records quite a collection actually that I stole from my mom. I have the original 'Thriller' album and I have a really great 'Elton John's Greatest Hits ' and I also have a N.E.R.D. album. Records sound more original. They have more edge.

We got a little waylaid along the way. The whole problem started about 10 years ago with management and legal battles then still trying to make albums while I was doing all of that.

So I went out and bought Hard Again by Muddy Waters. That was a big learning curve. I listened to that album again and again and again. James Cotton was the harmonica player on that album.

I enjoyed making this album a lot because of the knowledge we acquired over the last 3 years.

I've done a lot of albums and I kinda know when I'm onto something that was inspirational for me to record and create and this was one of those projects where I really enjoyed making the album.