Quote

I never had a car in high school, and I never had a car in college. I wasn't much of a run-around.

I grew up outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a little town, and went to a regular high school. I was a... very average student in that high school. Then I joined the Navy, and while I was in the Navy, I was in a motorcycle accident and woke up deaf in a hospital.

When I was 14, I was a passenger in a terrible accident.

I think about me and my dad taking a road trip from Phoenix to Nashville when I was 19. He's no longer here with me, but I still drive that same 1994 Chevy truck. I never have bought a new car.

My dad was a truck driver, and from the time I was knee high to a grapevine, I was driving a truck.

Once I took a bus from my home in Maryland to Philadelphia to live on the streets with some musicians for a few weeks, and then my parents sent me to boarding school at Andover to shape me up.

I grew up upper-class. Private school. My dad had a Jaguar. We're African-American, and we work together as a family, so people assume we're like the Jacksons. But I didn't have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.

I got a car when I was 16. I didn't even have a driver's license.

I was the only black girl at my junior high school. I had an afro, a Jamaican accent, I looked really old.

I was a very poor young black boy in New Orleans, just a face without a name, swimming in a sea of poverty trying to survive.