First of all, I'm married to a Middle Eastern woman so I wanted a Middle Eastern vibe on this record. I was talking to Harvey Mason Jr. about doing a Middle Eastern record. So we came up with this vibe and went, "Hey, it sounds like a party. Do you hear the funk?" We just went with it and it turned out really, really great. It was a lot of fun trying to do something out of the box and build off of a Middle Eastern vibe.
You experiment and incorporate a lot of contemporary elements into your music. As a role model and mentor to a large number of younger artists, what traditional elements do you hope a lot of them hold on to?
Well, the realism for the music, the guts and meat-and-potatoes of it all. I mean, there's a lot. There's a lady that asked me the other day, "What do you think about auto-tune that everybody uses, like T-Pain?" I said, "Hey, however they come in the game, they do their thing." It's okay with me. I don't bash music. All I hope is everybody understands what R&B music is. Then you can just take off from that. Pop music – they all come from R&B, all of it had come from that. If everybody remembers to hold on to the soul, the rhythm-and-blues part of it all, everybody would be just fine.
Over time, the R&B genre has been spliced into several different categories. The Recording Academy, for example, honors contemporary R&B and traditional R&B, at their annual GRAMMY Awards ceremony. What is R&B to you?
They put all these different names on it. I don't know what they mean by contemporary. A rhythm-and-blues record feels good to me. It's just a soulful music. It's what comes out of the heart. Back in the day, we just cut music that felt good and had great lyrics and had a nice beat to it. That's what it's coming back to. I don't know if they can call it contemporary or classic or they can call it fusion. I don't know what they want to call it, but it's just good R&B music. I don't know what they'll classify me as but, like you said, a 20 year old and a 60 year old are digging my music. I don't know if they're calling that classic in today's R&B. To me, that's just good R&B.
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