And so at a certain point, I just totally disengaged. I started saying to people, like: Believe whatever the fuck you want to believe, because I’ve got bigger fish to fry. If I paid attention to every crazy thing that was said about me, if I responded to every crazy conspiracy theory, I’d never have time to live my life, like, I’d never have time to actually make any music, and that’s what I’m supposed to be here for in the first place, right?

And so I just helped my mom and Bob with the wedding, and like, that was beautiful and it went great, and then I just disappeared for a little while to the South of France.

I just wanted to get the fuck out for a bit, you know? So I packed up and left the country and just tried to focus in. I just tried to get back into the root of the thing, which like, has always been the music—it’s always just been me alone at the piano or at the computer, and like, that’s what I wanted to get back to—so I found this little place that I could rent indefinitely, and the place had a grand piano, and so I was like: Dope.

And it was actually in that place in France that I started to make the album that would eventually become Roses and Mud. I wanted to go super-minimal, you know? Like, just me and the piano. And I actually got into a really nice groove with it when I was making those songs. I’d get up every day, and I’d have a little bit of breakfast—maybe a bowl of cereal or something—and then I’d just sit down at the piano and work for, like, hours at a time. And in the afternoons, I’d go out, like, go for a swim or some shit, and like, I’d invite different people up to come stay in the house and work on some shit with me—Scaggs dropped in, and Deez and Trick, and I even got Billy Maze to come out and sing some melodies for “Pump Bottle”—and it was this really dope setup. I just wanted to basically stay there for like, a couple of months, even a year, because back home all the shit with my dad and all the rumors and all that shit were just getting way too intense, and so I just didn’t even wanna be there at all. I was considering for a moment just like, totally uprooting my life and moving to France for good, but then, you know, the only reason I decided to even go back was because my mom was having the baby, and I obviously wasn’t gonna miss that.

I was surprised at first when she told me that she and Bob were expecting, but you gotta remember, my mom was super-young when she had me—she was only, like, twenty years old or something—and so it actually wasn’t that crazy, biologically, for her to give it another go. Plus, you know, Bob is estranged from his son—the kid he had however many years ago with his ex-wife—and so I think he was really into the idea of creating a whole new family with my mom and me.