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James Brown's music still sounds as fresh and as good and as new as it did when he first created it.

Everybody knew James Brown. Every musician dreamed of being in his band.

James Brown was the Monday-to-Friday guy. He was the hardest man in show business. He was like your dad and your uncle: He showed up, and he hit hard.

James Brown is the reason I play guitar.

John Brown was the abolitionist to end all abolitionists. People thought he was crazy. He was like John Coltrane playing free jazz, exhausting all possibilities in his approach to harmony and improvisation.

James Brown was my favorite, my absolute idol. Every time I played with him was like a music lesson, and I never thought I could be so funky! I mean, a white boy from Canada - a Jew - getting down with his funky bad self!

But that kind of falls in line; when you think about it, James Brown was a funk minimalist. All of those parts create a sum that's larger than than the individual parts.

There were bars that began to have acoustic musicians play, it was 1970: Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, America, The Eagles, all that kind of stuff was popular. It was very easy for me to just kind of move in and be noticed.

I was never just a 'fill in 16 bars on a beat' rapper. I was making real songs from the jump.

I'm coming from a Ginuwine and Usher background: slow and smooth songs. And that's why I really connected to Sam Cooke, because he was just very smooth. It's not like the James Brown types, which is all great stuff, but he was totally set apart from those guys.