And I mean, I should also say, like, my voice was changing at this point, you know? I just literally couldn’t sing the kinds of songs that I sang on the first album. Even if I had wanted to, I just physically couldn’t hit those notes anymore.

But my dad had written me all these songs for the second album, and like, they were about teenage shit, you know? Like, they were about NORMAL teenage shit. Honestly, looking back on it, I’m pretty sure that a lot of the songs were about stuff that like, my dad was feeling and going through when he was a teenager. And sure, some of those things were the same things I was going through, but for the most part, our lives were just completely different, and I couldn’t really find much to connect with.

And, you know, when you’re famous—when you’re like, at the top of the charts and you’re in L.A. and you’ve got the kind of fan base that I have—you meet people. You meet tons of people. And you’d be surprised by the kinds of people who want to work with you. I mean, even people who thought my first record was lame or whatever—you know, like, even people who thought I made music for kids—even they couldn’t deny my numbers. No one can turn their nose up at the kind of units I was pushing. And so I found myself in this position where I could call up, like, dope musicians, like, really dope people who I really respected, and I could be like: Yo, you wanna get in the studio today? And more often than not, they’d be like: Yeah, let’s go.

And so, without telling my dad—I mean, I wasn’t trying to go behind his back or whatever. I was just doing my thing, being creative with whoever I wanted—I would go chill with all these guys making sick music around L.A. We’d smoke weed or go get a hamburger and then we’d usually get around to making some tracks, and you know, it was guys like Z Bunny and Trick Hatz and Deez Soundzz—just like, really dope, really forward-thinking, really crazy guys who had been in the game for a while. And it’s not like I was even trying to put an album together—I just, like, after hanging with these guys every once in a while for a couple months, realized that I had a whole bunch of songs and that all of them were a lot more exciting to me than the stuff my dad and I had been working on.

And so one day, I was chilling with Deez Soundzz, and you know, he’s kind of crazy, like he’s kind of one of those guys who, when he gets that certain look in his eyes, you know he’s about to say some insane shit, and like, we were chilling with these girls, and they knew I was fifteen, but whatever, they were down, and we were in the jacuzzi at Deez’s place, and we were playing this track we had made for the girls on the speakers out there, and they were like, losing their minds over it. And, at some point, one of them was like: When is this coming out, Deez? And Deez just looked at me straight in the face, and he was like: Tonight, bitches. And I was like, immediately laughing and shit, like, I thought he was joking, but Deez was like: I’m serious, bro. Let’s roll the dice. And I was feeling kind of like … I don’t know, I was feeling like life was full of possibility, you know? I was feeling like life was so ridiculous. I was feeling like why be so precious about this second album? Who cared? I had so much to give the world, and like, not everything needs a strategy. Not everything needs a plan. Sometimes, you just gotta let inspiration take you—you just gotta make a bold, crazy move, and if people don’t like it, fuck ’em. Move on.