I don’t know much about U2 at all, but I know Bono does a lot of charitable things and I have been hearing that for years, and years, and years, and years.

I think ‘Pac, for my generation, is such a cultural figure. We don’t have the memories of all of our friends playing a new Tupac album. Tupac was dead when we were born. We don’t have that. But 'Pac’s impact on culture and on society I think is what we were able to see. Like, “Man, he’s been there for this amount of time, and all of the adults are still talking about him, so what did he do?” And then it’s up to us, I think to go find out, to go study, go listen and shit.

It’s part of my job to just be hella people person, so I don’t know. I think in a sense, doing the rap thing, I have gotten better with it. I don’t know, it’s definitely like it doesn’t come natural to me. The natural response is definitely super introvert, like not really talking to people. It still comes out at times, but I try. I do try my best in most situations to be a friendly guy. “No, I’m no Rihanna.” Rihanna put out ‘Anti.’ And I guess in a pop star sense, I’m just not Rihanna, bro. Nobody’s Rihanna, bro. You can’t be Rihanna. You can’t just be Rihanna. You don’t just wake up Rihanna.

Me and my granddad had an interesting relationship, man. It was so interesting ‘cause he was the reason that I did music in the first place. And then, once I started pursuing music, he wanted to take a step back and wanted me to go to school and do all of this other shit, so we dropped communication. And that’s another thing, that it was just weird to me. 'Cause I’m like, “I thought you would be happy with this, and you damn near don’t want anything to do with me now.” And he also passed.

“Tell me it’ll be okay,” that’s all I wanna hear. “Tell me it’ll be okay, tell me happier days.” Originally, I had another part right there, and all it said was, “Down the road.” So it went, “Tell me it’ll be okay, tell me happier days are down the road. For me, really it was like a happy eventually kind of thing. Like eventually you’ll figure it out. Eventually. And it was written at a moment where I didn’t have it figured out, and I was just looking for it. So that’s what that moment of the song was for me.

A concept that I have been thinking about since my cousin had passed was just life in general, and life not meaning shit, and I thought about how somebody could not value a life. Like to just take someone’s life, and I couldn’t really figure it out for the life of me. I couldn’t think about it ‘cause I hadn’t experienced that. All of this shit happened to me, and nothing led me to the point where I’m like, “I gotta take a life.” And that’s how that line came about. I was like, “What could have drawn this man to do what he did?” And that was the only answer that I can think of, “Nigga’s never had shit. Life don’t mean shit to a nigga that ain’t never had shit.”

The chorus was the hardest part of the song to write. Most of the song was easy to write ‘cause you just had to rap. But when you write the chorus, it’s like, “Okay, now it has to be good.” I wanted it to be as important as I thought the verses were, and that was a thing that I was struggling with. Sometimes I’m writing and I don’t know what the song is about, so how do you sum it up in a chorus, you know? And I didn’t know how. So for months and months, the song sat there with a verse, and the second verse, and the middle. No chorus, no real hook.

A lot of shit in other people’s lives that I think if anybody else wrote this song, it could have the same structure, the same format, and they can just change the moments, the chronological parts, they can just swipe it out, put whatever they went through there. And I think that’s what a lot of people do in how they relate to it, ‘cause they listen to it from their own life instead of mine, you know?

My uncle was super close with me, and he lived in our house and everything. So when he got taken away it was, again, another thing that I struggled with. And then when he came home, he just died in his sleep. So, it was another thing like crazy that I struggled with. And then my dad just not being in the same place that I was is another thing that I struggled with.