I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The dream of my family was for me to be an educated person.
As a young boy, I had strange dreams of affecting people and somehow being instrumental in changing the makeup of Africa and helping to improve life there.
I'm blessed to be living this dream of writing and singing, but that's not the real dream I had. The real dream was to make enough money to take care of all the pain and suffering that my mother has been through.
I had a dream of music and art and the big city in which I would get lost, where no one would know me and I wouldn't know anyone, where I would work at some ordinary job, and if one day I got up in the morning and decided I wasn't going to go to work anymore, no one would ask questions.
When our daughter was born, a light went on for me - there was more to life than what I was doing. It felt like being famous for being a paint salesman. It wasn't the dream I was sold on. I'd had enough of it.
I was a little boy singing sad songs, about 9 or 10 years old in the woods. I listened to my voice coming back to me. It was as high as you could go. I dreamed of being famous as a singer when I was on those cotton fields. I wanted to see the world and meet people.
My parents were super supportive of my big dreams; I was pretty lucky. I guess I became a musician because I didn't see myself doing or loving anything else as much.
I had this rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life, what had been my childhood dream.
All these interviews I'm doing - this is the kind of stuff that I was dreaming about doing when I was younger. I was praying for people to want to write about me. I wanted people to hear my music. I wanted to perform. I wanted to be on billboards.
I wanted the focus to be on my ability as a singer and as an entertainer - not on my private life.
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