“As a person, I have a lot of different sides to me, and I genuinely just embrace them. I don't think, 'Oh, I gotta put on my cool face now!'”

“Because everybody always encouraged me to sing, I assumed that I wasn't bad at it. It felt like it was obvious what I was going to pursue. I thought I was good for as long as I can remember.”

“Dance has always just been an extension of music for me. It's about putting my music into motion. It's just another dimension that I tap into with my music that not many artists do anymore.”

“Fashion is an extension of expressing who you are. I love to entertain and put on a show. And that's definitely a part of that.”

“For me, I prefer to work on my own. I feel like I can tap into a more genuine place, and I feel like my best stuff comes from writing on my own in my own zone.”

“For most artists, you take what you have and who you are, and then you expand on it to make it more entertaining. Everyone knows actors aren't the same people that they play in movies, but people somehow expect musicians to be a certain way all the time!”

“I feel like, at the end of the day, I always would try to make music that I wanted to listen to: stuff that I liked and wanted to hear.”

“I love to act and put on a show, but you're playing a character all the time. For music, it's really just me being myself.”

“I think, in general, more women need to be involved in music and in the industry - that's been an issue.”

“I want people to know that I'm a force to be reckoned with.”

“I was in a competing company and have been dancing since I was four - ballet, tap, jazz, hip hop - so it's a huge part of my life and my music.”

“I was in my first movie when I was five. I just loved to entertain and put on a show.”

“If you're a creative person, what inspires you is always changing; it's always shifting.”

“I'm always about having integrity with my fans and staying true to what I say.”

“I'm the kind of person who doesn't wait for opportunities to fall from the sky.”

“I'm the type of person that doesn't like to wait for people to do things for me, and I never want to feel stuck. Why sit around and be like, 'I wish my label would book me some studio time,' if I can just buy my own studio equipment and figure out how to run Pro Tools and record it myself?”

“It's important for me to put out things that I think are good - I want to be a fan of my own stuff. I also want my live shows to be really awesome, and dance is such an important element for me and my performances.”

“It's never one solitary event that has changed my life. It's a bunch of little pieces that built and built up to where I am now.”

“My dad was a theater actor, so he had an agent, and he brought me into his agency when I was maybe four years old. That was how I started. I started modeling, and it progressed from there.”

“My dad's from Zimbabwe, and my mom is Danish, Irish, and Norwegian, so I have influences from a lot of different places.”

“My music is a direct reflection of the eclectic person I am. I don't like to be stuck in an R&B box.”

“Part of the reason I fell in love with dance so early was because of people like Janet Jackson, Michael Jackson, and Britney Spears. When they would dance onstage and in their videos, that was huge for me. I lived for that.”

“The craziest part of being on tour is being overseas and having crazed fans so far away from home. They don't speak English, but they still know the lyrics. That's a trip.”

“The earliest you can play Christmas music is on Thanksgiving.”

“The priority for me is just to make music that people can connect with. I want to make something fresh that people may not understand.”

“To break R&B into subcategories does a disservice to the music. I like to live in a zone where I can do whatever I want, where I don't have to worry about genre.”