When I was growing up, I never saw couples fight on the family sitcoms I loved to watch. Subsequently, when tough times arose in my own relationship, I wasn't prepared and felt so isolated and alone. Marital issues weren't a part of the narrative that television told me was a 'working relationship.'

My wife is a doctor, and we had a decent life financially. My kids were going to nice schools and had nannies. We weren't rich, but we were better off than I was growing up. And I looked around, and I was like, 'Who are these people?' It was the opposite of what I remembered growing up.

For me, one of the big things I really worried about a lot was nuclear war growing up.

When you're in the middle of it, when you're a kid growing up, you don't think, 'This is my first heartbreak.' You just think, 'My heart is broken.' But then as a parent, you look back, and you see your child go through his or her first heartbreak, and you're realizing, 'Oh my God, this is her first heartbreak.'

I read academic books on courtesan culture at the turn-of-the century in Shanghai such as Gail Hershatter's 'The Gender of Memory'. The diaries were mostly in the form of letters from courtesans to a lover who had disappeared or taken their savings.

I love the romance in Kimberly Derting's 'The Body Finder.' 'Cold Kiss' by Amy Garvey is unbelievably touching - and about so much more than just romantic love.

Umm... I don't judge my relationship with Puff or Bad Boy according to other people or past artists. At the end of the day, you are in charge of your career, and you can't depend on no man to do anything for you. I've learned to judge relationships with a person on myself and that person, not what they have done with previous people.

My music is about where I am at the time. In 'Raymond vs. Raymond,' I was going through a lot of things, and it came out in my music. My marriage fell apart, and I was suddenly a single father.