I see. Between, singing, writing, and producing, how do you manage to balance it all?
The key is really to continue to just do it. When you overload, then you have to find the balance. But the key is to get it done. And sometimes you have to let somebody else figure out how to balance it. That's always my key. I have a whole bunch of material set up and when it's time to put something in place, I just hire people to get down and do it. 'This is what I need over here; this is what I need over there.' And I continue doing what I need to do so I can stay creative.
Initially, your third album was to be entitled Acquitted. What led you to change the name to Freedom?
A lot of times when you try to move into a positive realm and you try to move everything into a positive level, of course the word "convict" sounds negative to everybody. I had to explain to them exactly what that was and why it shows in the name. A lot of people got it. You can come out of a situation like that — a convicted felon — and start over and not necessarily be looked at as somebody evil, you know what I'm saying? Everybody makes mistakes. You do your thing. You change your life over and then you make moves to get better. The whole concept was, you know, troubled, convicted, then acquitted. But because of how the media was perceiving it, I felt like the whole goal of what we're trying to do as far as the movement was being translated wrong. Everyone took the negative aspect of it because of the incident in Trinidad and Tobago and all the other stuff that was going on, and they were using that to try to paint the Konvict brand as a company to view negatively.
So I had to restructure everything on how we did things, how we imaged ourselves, and even the titling of our projects, so that we could prevent anything negative. That's when we took Acquitted and changed it to Freedom. They really mean the same thing but "freedom" is reflected in a more positive light. When you're acquitted, you naturally think negative. You think court, you think convicted felon, you think of someone bad getting away with something. Whereas "freedom," it opens your mind to a lot of bigger, broad concepts which is a lot more positive than the word "acquitted." So we decided to change the words because that is the image we want to portray and bring across to the rest of the world.
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