Actually, I don’t really want to get into this right now, but my dad killed himself. He fucked himself up. Shotgun to the face. Most of you probably already knew that. And that was AFTER I was famous, so I remember that day. I mean, I wasn’t there—we had been estranged for a minute—but I remember finding out about it. I didn’t even get a phone call from the police or anything. I was on an airplane when it happened, and so when I got off at the gate, immediately this paparazzi motherfucker came up to me and he was like: Yo, how do you feel about your dad? And I was like: Listen, I’ve told you people everything I have to say about my dad already. Stop asking me about him. And he was like: But how do you feel about what happened today? And I was like: What are you talking about? And he—I mean, there were a bunch of other paparazzi people there too, you know, and all of them just went like, suddenly silent. Like, all of them just kind of looked at each other and they were like: This is fucked up. Like, even the paparazzi guys were like: This isn’t how he should find out. But I could tell that something was up—I mean, I’d never seen a paparazzi act like this before—and so I was like: What the fuck are you talking about? And the paparazzi guy was like, really nervous to say it—like, he felt really bad—but none of the other paparazzi people were gonna do it for him—he knew that it was his duty at this point—and so he just stammered out: He … he killed himself. Your dad’s dead. And the way he said it, like, I just knew it was true. I just saw the whole thing in my mind. And the paparazzi people were all, like, watching me come to realize it, and their cameras were rolling on me, and nobody was saying anything, and then I just fucking booked it. My security guards were pushing people out of the way, going full linebacker mode. And I’ve watched the videos of me doing this a couple of times. There’s a few different videos online that have been uploaded because, you know, there were a few different paparazzi guys there. And some of them are sort of close up on my face hearing the news and some of them are wider, giving a view of the whole thing, and there’s this one video that’s got almost as many views as that first video of me singing the national anthem, and that’s the one I watch sometimes.

But I grew up in just a regular town. I was just like, a regular kid. I started singing in church. We were part of this small church, this like, really tiny local church, and we had this choir director, and he wasn’t black, but he had us only singing black songs. He would always say: Black church is what all church should aspire to be. And so he had us singing like, traditional black music, you know, and we really went for it. None of us were black, but we were really committed. I would do all the solos because I had like, this next-level voice, and I remember the choir director taking me aside one day and saying: Boy, you got the SPIRIT in you! And I guess that’s when I first realized that I had something special. I mean, I’ve never talked to God—some people have. Some people in the choir said they did—but when I’m singing, it’s like sometimes I can feel him, you know?