With that competitiveness, is it tough for you to stay quiet when you’re recording?
For sure. I’ll hear songs on the radio, and I’m not really a fan of what’s going on right now in music. I’ll hear it and go, “Ugh, why is this being played so much right now?” I have such great music that I want to share with the world.

What did you learn from it?
I learned a lot. I moved in with my girlfriend when I was 18. Started my own life with her. It was a marriage kind of thing. Living with a girl, it was just too much at that age. But we were so in love. Nothing else mattered. We were all about each other. But when it’s like that and you get your value from that, people will always disappoint you. Your girl or your dude, they’re always going to disappoint you. Your full identity can’t be in that person. My identity was in her. Her identity was in me. When stuff would happen, I would lose my freakin’ mind, and she would lose her mind, and we would fight so hard because we were so invested in each other. Love is a choice. Love is not a feeling. People have made it seem in movies that it’s this fairy tale. That’s not what love is. You’re not gonna want to love your girl sometimes but you’re gonna choose to love her. That’s something in life that I had to figure out. I can’t lean on people.

You said you scrapped this album previously because it didn’t match up with your mindset. What was lacking?
I’ve done probably three or four albums that I haven’t released yet. I’ve gotten all of these different modes, and try to dive into different ideas, and I finally came up with something that was pretty genius.