Everything Is Personal (2014) I'll be totally honest, this album came in my life a year after I had to sell everything, including my computer, CD-players, CD-writers, VHS tapes, my Walkman, and my stereo and I wasn't so cool with that. But it was time to cut my loss and move on. And I didn't know what to do with all my stuff. Then I was given this album by someone who was trying to find out if they could sell it to me. In all honesty, I never really cared for most of it so I just said, "Fuck it." So she let me try it out and man it was dope, so I bought it for a dollar and played it all the time. But at that time I didn't know who the artist was. So when I got back from tour I was like "Yo, who was the dude that did this?" so I googled his name and found out it was Mac Miller. I listened to this shit on the plane and didn't know what to think. So I wrote about it in my book and asked for permission to write about it and he gave me all the rights. When I got back to Toronto, I wrote a page and a half of this fucking thing and it was the only thing I wrote for the whole tour. Now I own this shit for life. And it's crazy because it's always been cool to me. I know the feeling that was going on, you know, because I was in a similar situation just like he was when he had to get rid of a lot of stuff. He always was around in the city and he just happened to live across the street from me. And we was always trying to be cool and go up in the clubs when he was off and stuff, just trying to be part of the crew. And after our shit got too crazy, which happened about a month later, I didn't talk to him. So I haven't really talked to him since, but all the shit I seen him do, you know how he made his own show for a while, that shit was insane. He just made it work. I know what's in his head. I know how he thinks because I was around it. It's always been like that. You had no choice but to change and grow as a person after doing music. Do you think you would have changed as a person if it wasn't for music and touring and all of that? It made me grow up. If I didn't start touring, I would still be the same kid I was when I got locked up, you know what I'm saying. But it was all necessary. It made me mature faster than most people did. Because it taught me how to have my own time, be able to be the one in charge of what I do. Before that shit was just all about being a rapper and who you know, and what you got, and just going around begging for money. But that's just something that you do. You take a beat and you rap on it, and you try and make a song, but you're not putting anything out there that nobody else hasn't seen. And so the only way that you can make something that's dope is you have to be dope yourself, or you have to get dope people around you. And most people don't get dope people around them. So it was more dope to be locked up and make dope with a bunch of niggas in jail than to be out there not doing anything. You mentioned how you felt it was necessary to do the jail time in the past, but how did you feel about going through it again? Well I had gone through it and then I was let out, but I didn't really do the jail time for the wrong reasons. I was twenty-one and I had this thing called “The Blue World” that they couldn't take away from me, so it was like, "I'm going to jail, but I'm gonna do this before it goes back." So I did it and then it was like, "Okay, what do you want to do?" What about your family and your loved ones? How did they react when you got locked up and everything? At first they weren't even speaking to me, because I was being a big fuck up in high school. All this kind of bullshit. But when I went to jail the first time, I was just tired of being in high school, so it was cool. When I did the second time, my mom still wasn't talking to me at the beginning, and that shit hurt. And when I got out of jail, we were just really different people. Because she didn't want to be around me when I was locked up. You ever wonder how your childhood could have been different? Yeah. You would be locked up and you would think to yourself "Why wasn't I like this? Why couldn't I have handled the shit differently?" It just don't add up. You know? It's like, you don't always understand what you did and you think that one thing in your life is the reason you where you are now. But it's more things like how your mom reacted to you in high school than the one thing. When you talk about your mom, it seems like the first time was the real moment when you thought, "Oh man, I can't relate to this guy no more." I went to high school and was doing all this crazy stuff that everybody else did and it wasn't nobody in my neighborhood that was in high school like that, man. It was like I went to a different school. It wasn't my school at all. And they were like, "Why is this guy so badass? Why is this kid in jail?" I was always doing different shit. I was always in the mix, doing crazy shit. You had a friend that went to high school with you who was a little bit older, a guy named Siddiq. Do you remember how he got along with your mom? No, she don't like to talk about that stuff. I don't know why that is, but she won't even get real when it comes to talking about that. Even when I was locked up. I tried to talk to her, but that was her. "I don't want to talk about that." But for the most part, she just didn't understand why I was doing the stuff that I was doing, but once I started getting raps out and started getting better music together, then she got a lot of that shit. She was okay with that. It's not like she wanted me to be doing it, but she understood and knew that I had the skill to be able to do it. I'm not saying that she necessarily thought that I could be a rapper. She just didn't understand it because she wasn't around it before and she didn't understand it. I also wanted to talk to you about your mom's role in your life before all this happened. Because we see how tough your mom can be in her music, but I feel like she has a very soft side as well. But that might be my own bias, because I know how much of a hard ass she can be. It's really cool to hear that because you feel like, "Okay, she's tough like this." I never really thought about my mom in those terms, but now when people look at me as this rapper, you know? It's crazy. You guys have different kinds of perspectives on the world now. When you were in high school, do you think you would have had the same perspectives if you were still living at home? I think I would have had a different perspective, but I was just into it a lot, you know what I mean? At first, I was just looking at it as a kid in high school. But then it was like, "I could be doing this shit. I know I can make music and get it out and not have to worry about what anybody thinks." But at the same time, it was also about how it was a lot of dope shit that was going on at that time. It was about a lot of the different styles. A lot of the hip hop and rap that I know of right now, I really like. It was about the hip hop and rap of the day, but also just good rap. I was into that as well, but I was into the different things that were going on too. I was into the heavy shit, too. I was into the rock and roll and different music, you know what I'm saying. I was more into the soul music than I was into the rappers. Soul music is a whole different beast. Do you think you had a particular type of personality in high school? I was thinking about going to school, but I wasn't really that into what they had to offer. And I think in school you learn a little bit about yourself, so I was just wondering if you think you were the same person or different when you were in high school, or was it different after you got locked up and your whole career blew up? I think I was the same person. But I would change a little bit every time I did something new. Because in high school, it was all about the school thing. I was a good kid. I always tried to do good and not get in trouble. But it was just a lot of going out and trying to get drunk every single night.