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I remember Alicia Keys and Usher had released a song called 'My Boo,' and my music teacher got me to sing a duet with a friend of mine, and I remember being so nervous because I loved to sing, but I could never fathom singing by myself. And when I did that, I remember how proud I was of myself. I was 12.

When I was little I went to a Baptist Church with my grandmother. My earliest memories were of her falling out in the middle of the floor and they had to cover her with a white sheet. Every time we went to church it was scary. The music would start playing, and then everybody would start running and shouting and hollering and screaming.

I went to a concert once when I was a little kid and ran up onstage, started dancing, started saying anything that came to my head. I was like a little vaudevillian.

I remember growing up singing; even when I was just three years old, I was singing all the time in the house. My parents said I was singing before I could even talk properly.

My earliest musical memory is of my older sister playing me Nirvana's 'Nevermind' on headphones in the back of the car on a road trip.

When I was 3 or 4, I seemed to be bursting with music. They played Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra in the house, so I learned my vocabulary from song lyrics - I was literally singing before I was talking.

As soon as I could talk, I was bellowing at the top of my lungs. My parents couldn't get over how weird I sounded - like an old man when I was just a toddler! But no one was gonna shut me up.

When I was eight, my mum found me humming to myself and scribbling on a scrap of paper. When she asked me what I was doing, I got shy. I was writing a Christmas song, and I had never shared my music with anyone before. Reluctantly, I sang it for her... and she loved it. Of course she did - she's my mum.

When I think back to my childhood, it's with a mixture of amusement and embarrassment. I was always forgetting things. My mum called me scatty because I could never sit still. But there was no sense I was suffering from a medical condition as such.