It's about you putting in the work, practicing every day, and hopefully one day you write the song the whole world wants to get down to. And one day you're going to be sitting next to Ellen DeGeneres talking about how you broke records and rocked the Super Bowl!

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

I wrote a song called Dirty Diana. It was not about Lady Diana. It was about a certain kind of girls that hang around concerts or clubs, you know, they call them groupies.

When I was four, I wrote a song about falling into a black hole.

I used to write random little stupid things when I was five, but then the first song I really wrote was one called 'Fingers Crossed,' which is on SoundCloud.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don't really think that hard.