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With Dollars And Cents on the album, we had it as a band jam and I sometimes spend evenings playing with records over the top of things we were working on to see what works.

What I did to celebrate was I went home to my 535-square-foot apartment by myself and ate supper by myself. That was how I celebrated getting a record deal.

I was always a kid trying to make a buck. I borrowed a dollar from my dad, went to the penny candy store, bought a dollar's worth of candy, set up my booth, and sold candy for five cents apiece. Ate half my inventory, made $2.50, gave my dad back his dollar.

I was in Washington, D.C., on the morning show, by the time I was 18, programming a station by 19, No. 1 in the mornings. I think I was making, I don't know, a quarter of a million dollars by the time I was 25.

I was the highest-paid street performer, probably, in the history of Chicago. I was making like $800 a day.

The first job I ever had was singing in a jazz club when I was like 15 with my friend, and we earned like 70 bucks. We were like, 'Oh my God!'

The minute they gave me number one, I went to the studio. I was ready to give y'all something else. I was going 120 miles an hour.

I became a millionaire overnight by signing a piece of paper. I made more money in that one second than my entire family did in their lifetime.

I couldn't live on the singing at first, so I worked as a cleaner, in a launderette, in a garage, face painting and doing the windows of shops at Christmas, 'cause I had been to art college.