"I started writing lyrics when I was about 15 or 16 years old. Writing about my personal experiences and whatnot that I had had in my life up to that point. I started to take my own experiences of growing up in a household where there was drug addiction bigtime, and I thought how come so many people I know are in the same situation, living in the same conditions? So from there it kind of expanded, I started thinking about the community, and not just what position I'm in, and why I'm here."

"The thing about the Bay is that there's a lot of different sounds, there's a variety of hip-hop. And I came up, like I say, probably 12 or 13 years ago, and you know when I first started getting out like in the scene and whatnot, I've seen the Bay Area go through mad changes, but at the same time there's still like a core of like ­ you know we've got our Vallejo sound, Fillmore sound, you know and then we have like our conscious you know, kind of hip hop heads and whatnot. So I don't know, the Bay has mad flavor."

"[La Peña] is one of the few places, I want to say in the Bay, but it probably even expands further than that, but for the Bay it is one of the few places where you can come and have a show and you don't have to be a super big name, you don't need to be getting commercial radio play and things like that. They were the first folks to like open up a venue and have a real sound system and then promotion, and people that come through to check them out just because they know La Peña's gonna have something crackin. And that's a lot, for an artist like myself and other artists that are thinking about social issues and things that are not popular in what we think of as mainstream music. La Peña, like I say, it's a real venue, so you can expect a quality show. We can't take that for granted because those of us who are underground, independent artists, how else do you get people to be hip to your music, and be hip to your message if you don't have any place to put it out."