Ne-Yo

I would love to be able to say that due to my experience in the music industry, when it comes to the songs, I'm killing it over anybody else, but that is not the case. Everybody in this thing is ridiculously talented to where I don't feel special.

I'm good but not great at 'Madden'. I have friends that their whole life is based around this video game.

Hats have been my thing pretty much my whole life but finance has not. I would go to the corner store and buy really cheap baseball style caps and wear those to school.

For the first few years of my life my mom used to cut my hair so there were a lot of bowl-cut hair styles.

Battle: Los Angeles' - I've got to say this was easily one of the most physically trying things that I've ever done in my life because I play a Marine in the film, and they had us training with real live Marines for, like, three weeks. It gave me a whole new respect for just the armed forces, period.

All my musical influences came from my mom, who did everything to music. She played it 24 hours a day, seven days a week in our house. So that's where my love for music came from.

My mom has always been a caregiver, and she's perfect in this role leading my foundation.

I'm a rather multifaceted person - or at least I like to fashion myself as such - so my dreams are multifaceted. For example, I had a dream of winning a Grammy, right? I've done that three times over.

The Auto-Tune makes everybody sound the same and takes away all of the emotion because you're singing through this machine, and of course your taking all of this emotion out of your voice for the most part.

For starters, I wanted to do an acting role in a movie that had nothing to do with the music business or in which I would play a singer or a songwriter. When I act, I don't even want to be thought of as Ne-Yo.

There are different kinds of R&B happening today. There's the traditional, more soulful R&B that doesn't get the recognition that it deserves. Then there's the more hip-hop oriented stuff. You got your boy Ty Dolla $ign, people like that, who are bringing more hip-hop elements to R&B, which is cool.

I'm trying to bring something new to the Tin Man. He may be the one without the heart, but he's the most heartfelt guy there. It's a more manly heartfelt, a 'don't feel sorry for me' - type of heartfelt. I don't want to say tougher, because that just sounds stupid. But the Tin Man is a man's man.