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Obviously, fans are the beginning and end for any artist. The minute your fans embrace you and accept you, you begin this ride of being in music and having a career doing something you love. You get to go be a kid and live out your dreams by performing music for fans who come out to your shows.

In other words, the celebrity gets out of hand, and if you're not careful, you will forget what you are about - and that is you are about making music that people want to hear.

People tend to forget that celebrities are human beings. We live our lives. We try to do what we love, which is music. And to share it with everyone in our job usually is to entertain and to make people forget their troubles.

The idea of celebrity has always been very strange to me because it's taking the focus away from the music and attaching it to a person. When we put someone on a pedestal or idolize them, we're giving our own power away.

I realized that, all along, my theory was right: Make music that you want to hear, and instead of having fans that one day might criticize or abandon you, your fans aren't even fans. They're people with tastes similar to yours. They're friends you haven't met yet.

I never wanted to be that fad type of artist. When I looked up to artists, watching TV, I wanted to see somebody. I wanted to touch that person. I wanted to sound like them. I wanted to move like them. That' s what I want my fans to do. So that's why, everything that I do, the music I make, how I dress, it's all based off my lifestyle.

The bigger you become of a celebrity, the bigger the expectations, the pressure on you - to make change, to say what people want, to target the people they want to target. Fame is toxic; it is quite toxic.

When you have celebrity, it's a whole different thing than being an artist.

You either have fans who stick with you, or they don't. It comes down to making music that people connect with and great fans.

Knowing so many people like myself who are singers and in traveling bands, the people you're in a relationship with feel slighted because they feel you're giving all your energy to your fans, and there's a lot of truth to that.