How has your understanding of peace change over the years? Is there a particular Biblical or religious or philosophical message that guides your life?
My concept of peace has evolved. It's interesting because the people around me always say "You know, you're one cool joker. You don't seem to be stressed about nothing." I just keep it calm. I don't fret. I don't believe in stressing my body and stressing my mind to the point where I'm feeling crazy. After experiencing certain things and removing expectations on people – I don't have expectations because if you have, you will be disappointed. I came to accept the fact that I should only have great expectations on any level of myself. That's it. I realized everything circles back to me. My whole concept of peace is I'm always in position to take the peaceful path, so every opportunity that I get, that's the path that I'm going to choose. Simple as that.
On Exist, you use the water element quite a bit. What does the element of water mean to you?
I tend to ask people questions like, "If you were an element, what would you be?" Of course, this question was posed back to me. This was before I became aware that Scorpio was the water symbol. I would always say, "You know what, I'd be water." The reason is you can't hold water back. You can contain it for a period of time but it's going to make its way through. When you look at tunnels that run underwater, there's a constant maintenance that's going on where they're constantly pumping water out. Humans can't keep water out, locks, none of that. Anywhere you look at mountains, boulders, rocks or whatever, they're all shaped by water. Water cleans, water purifies. It's used in almost everything to make everything. If you look at the earth being made mostly of water. If you look at the human body, mostly we're made of water. It's amazing. When I encapsulate it all, water is fluid. It moves freely, wherever it wants to, period.
At the time of your birth, your name was Antonio Jeffries. At what point did you become Tony Rich? What served as inspiration for the name?
Yeah, the name story is a really good one. My mother's maiden name is Richards. She and my father married; his last name is Jeffries but my mother never changed her name. So me and my brothers, we all grew up with Richards. I grew up as Antonio Richards. My friends used to always cut up my name like Tony Richards. I was called that for awhile. Then a friend who chopped it down and started calling me Tony Rich. That's how the name came about. When I got married the first time, I actually decided to change my last name to Jeffries because my father died by that time – well, years before that. On my father's side, I had one aunt who still had the last name Jeffries. I have one cousin who's married so now she has the last name of her husband. So as far as I knew, there was only one Jeffries left. I changed my last name to Jeffries before I got married. Then it became three Jeffries – the woman I was married to at the time, my aunt and myself. Once I had my children, there was a whole bunch of Jeffries [laughing]. That's why I changed my name.
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