"Night of the Living Dead was one I saw with my dad. I was 18 years old. It scared the s— out of me. I think my dad and I had to sleep together that night. [laughs] I said, “No, that’s it. I don’t care how big I am!” And what I loved about it, too, was how [George] Romero could just take this film, and do it clearly on a budget, and yet make it work, have this sort of tongue-in-cheek humor with it. So part of what, I think, attracted me to the films I mentioned was not just the films themselves, but how they were made, what they meant politically, on all levels. I’m attracted to all those films that, in a way, engaged us across cultures. So, you look at Night of the Living Dead and you put these people in the 1960s in this pressure cooker, and one of them is the black guy, one of them is the white guy, one of them is the chick, and the brother and sister, and you see what happens. The unspoken subtext of it was huge. It was huge, it was revolutionary. Mutiny on the Bounty was the same thing. And even in films like Redemption Road, where I’ll take the black guy, and he’s the one who’s into country and western, and the white guy, he’s the one who’s into blues, and both of them, along the way, are going to encounter music that informs their personal narrative, and it also informs the musicality of the film. So, along the way they pick up some blues, some gospel, some jazz, and that feeds into the song they play at the end of the movie, the sort of redemptive song. So I think those movies actually speak to what I’m attracted to in film. I just like something that, on some level, even if it’s a horror film, is interesting and redemptive and makes you think."

"Leon Ware is one of those people, if not the main person, that taught me what it was to be a songwriter. I'm very happy and fortunate to say that I got a chance to tour with him at a very early age. He was my first experience with songwriting. When you go listen to Musical Massage, you can hear the spirit behind most of the things people were doing in the 70s; everybody that we know that Leon used to write with, like Minnie Riperton and Quincy Jones and Marvin Gaye, just to name the ones that are easily pinpointable out the gate. You can see his spirit through the music. Musical Massage is, I think, the perfect soul album. I'm not lying to you. In my opinion there's only a few that exist in that space. Leon Ware's album was the actual definition of soul. And you can hear songs that were copied from it; you can hear like 'oh, this is where this person did this' and 'This is where this person took this'. That's where I learned how to be a songwriter; Leon Ware taught me everything about songwriting. He taught me the emotion behind it, he taught me how to get to those emotions, he showed me what it was to not to ever quit, no matter what is getting thrown at you. One of my favourite songs that brings tears to my eyes, like to this day is 'Got To Be Loved' on Rockin' You Eternally – I know that's a big jumped from 1976 to 81, but let me say, every time I hear that song I can feel that whatever he was feeling when he wrote it, and I think it hit me at different points in life too. So this is all about Leon Ware's prowess as a songwriter and why he was the hit maker that he was. I get to spend some time with some quality time with him growing up, and I'm really grateful for that. So Musical Massage is a journey, man, it's a real journey. I remember telling Tyler, The Creator about Leon Ware, and Tyler's very much to himself, but you can see every now and again Tyler will say something about how important Leon Ware's music is, and I think even Tyler even went so far as to try to write some stuff with Leon. God rest his soul because he passed a few years ago; that was very difficult. He left me and us with a lot of music, and to this day when I think about my own songs like 'Them Changes' or 'The Turn Down' it's always was a reminder to say how you feel."