"I am an artist from a family of musicians. My uncle plays and restores pianos and my brother travels the world playing tenor saxophone. As a kid I had no patience with piano lessons and learning to read music but absorbed everything I heard on the "Super Mix", a Saturday night radio program that was broadcast from the Fort Bragg military base near where I grew up. It was just far enough away that reception required one hand on the pause button and the other on an elaborate assembly of coat hangers, duct tape and tin foil jammed into the hole that was once an antenna on my boom box. I recorded the show every week with the volume low so not to disturb my mother’s ultra sonic night hearing which would result in radio confiscation. Each week a new style of early New York hip hop found its way into the mind of a 12 year old boy living in the attic of a log cabin in rural North Carolina. By the time Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5 dropped "The Message," I was writing my own rhymes and banging out beats on the desks at school. Those beats have been in the back of my mind all my life."
