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I did all the musicals in my high school; I was in a pop group signed to Cash Money Records in college. Music has always been a really big part of my life.

In college, I faced an interesting problem. I wanted to play music all the time and yet I wasn't ready for anyone to hear it. To remedy this, I took to retreating to stairwells as a safe place to sing and write music. It was there that I wrote most of my songs in college and really grew into an artist.

I was going to go to college and graduate and move to New York and do the Broadway thing. That's where a lot of my influences vocally and writing come from. Then I did some covers, and towards the end of college, I saw it was a path I could take. I wrote more pop music.

My musical education started in the limelight, because I found myself surrounded by real musicians, but after my career had taken off.

I knew I wanted to be in music, but I didn't know my role, so I did everything from interning at Rolling Stone to writing heavy metal fanzines to playing in a high-school band, and I think all those things probably helped in a way.

Before I'd even started doing music or having opportunities with my own music, I was studying production and business and stuff anyway. I knew there were so many jobs within the music industry - songwriting or session playing or working at a label - and I was really interested in how it all works.

I sang throughout school, and it was always my passion. For whatever reason, acting took the front seat, but all of the projects that I've been doing seem to have some sort of musical element to them.

I started teaching myself guitar because I loved singing so much. Then one day kind of out of the blue I found I was writing a song. It just happened organically.

I was in a band at school, and almost from the day we started, I started writing songs, just because that seemed what you did.