Daniel Caesar

Female energy is very comforting and beautiful.

My goal is to not fit in. My worst nightmare is being the baby version of another artist.

These days, it's more like me coming from playing a show and feeling the high from all the energies directed at me, to feeling a bit weird when I go home to the place where people know me from before all that.

We had some Stevie Wonder and Luther Vandross, but there’s a lot of hip-hop and other black music that I just never grew up on. My parents didn’t listen to anything other than black gospel."

My mom would say I’m a good kid… but I put them through a lot. I was rejecting religion and, not permanently, also kind of rejecting the things that they’d taught me, and just trying to think for myself."

Real power is being able to take care of yourself. My job is to make art, but I aspire to do more than that.

A lot of artists are aspiring to fill an archetype as opposed to being themselves. Even if they can’t quite put their finger on it, fans can tell."

Love songs are kind of like hymns if you think about it. Gospel songs are basically songs of adoration about God, or whatever you want to call Him.

Before I moved to the city I spent every Saturday sitting in church wishing I could be living on my own, doing what I wanted.

Being from Canada, we’re in a unique position to fund the music and then, because we own the masters, reinvest the profits,” he explains. “I live still very modestly and I spend a lot of time living at my managers’ houses. We all believed in it, but I’ve had a lot of help."

I was raised in an intensely religious household and I think the influence shows through my music.

Everyone has golden years sparsely throughout their life, but good things happen and then good things disappear. But you’ll always have those good times, and when you’re on your deathbed you’ll be able to look back on those times when you were with the girl of your dreams."