"Being from the South and being from that whole No Limit/Cash Money movement you’re a Wayne fan. You give him his props just for being associated with the Hot Boyz. It was at a period when I had just gotten to college. ""I had a suitemate that ended up being one of my good friends in life, and he was putting me onto these Lil Wayne Squad Up mixtapes. I started really noticing his lyrical ability. I noticed that something had changed between his younger Hot Boyz days and then. ""After that, we got out and went home for the summer. He was like, ‘Did you hear this Lil Wayne Tha Carter?’ and he sent me his album. I’ll never forget hearing that intro thinking, ‘This shit is crazy.’ That album and his first Dedication mixtape was what got me sold on him to the point where I was going out and praising Lil Wayne, like, ‘This nigga is the best.’ This album represents that time when he started to hit that monster level."

"I got really into reggae music in high school. Her vocals, her phrasing, everything taught me so much about how to put emphasis on different syllables, the way to punctuate things, making something sound extremely effortless when it wasn't. She's having fun and goofing around but I know that it takes a lot of work to make it sound like that. That was something that really appealed to me, wanting things to sound alive, effortless and fun while still touching on heavy issues. She just has a fucking great voice, as a singer she's just inspirational. I hadn't started doing anything yet, that was before college, I probably didn't own the album to be honest, I just taped stuff off the radio. I couldn't afford to buy a lot of records and my parents never had a lot of records. We'd buy singles at this place called Roxy Maxis for 99 cents. I taped all of the stuff on cassette so I'm sorry that I didn't pay for it."