Olivia: Joe is also one of my top favorite male, R&B singers. The Source: Well, you already mentioned Brandy, but who are some other musical artists that have inspired you? It sounds like it’s so hard, but the simple things is what will calm you down and bring down your anxiety.
You know, it really is the simplest things. Also, simple things, just like sitting by yourself and with everything off, no TV, no music, just try to relax. I love flowers and sometimes I’ll have flowers in the house. Stuff like that kind of calms you down or relaxes you.
We go for walks at night too in whichever city or state we’re in. Olivia: One main thing I try to do since I live in Florida now and we’re close to the beach, I try to take long walks. How do you deal with pressure, anxiety, stress, all the things that we all go through? The Source: Ok, so your album is called Under Pressure and May is Mental Health Awareness month. I don’t want it to get out yet until we’re ready for the album. So are there any guest artists on your new album? The Source: For sure, setting the bar high. I feel like his tracks make me write even better and I try to make sure that I get producers that can come with the same type of energy, the winning type of mentality in the tracks that I want. So you have to automatically write something that matches the smash that he did. His tracks just catch you when you hear them, like the tracks alone, you can tell those are smashes. Olivia: Well of course everybody brings something different, but I have a particular producer named HV, which stands for high volume. What do you think each of them brought to the album, in addition to your talents? The Source: You worked with multiple producers on this album. You can play every track back to back and you get the same vibe. I have a lot of different blends in there because I don’t like to stick to one genre, but the album totally follows. She is really one of my inspirations as far as the R&B side, but everybody knows I love hip-hop, so that’s infused in it as well. She walked in and I was stunned because again, I’m like 22 years old and I’m like, ‘oh my God, Brandy is actually in the session.’ One of my first favorite songs that I recorded, she was actually in a session with me because she was married to Bert (Robert ‘Big Bert’ Smith) at the time. I’m a big Brandy fan, so you get a lot of those tones and we have similar tones, but I always listened to her harmonies and stuff. They can clearly hear how much my sound has evolved. We just did a bunch of singles and features and everything. And then on G-Unit, we didn’t do an album. Olivia: They can expect something totally different because the first album that I did was on J Records- and that’s when I first came out, which was when I was like 21 years old. The Source: What can fans expect different on this album than past albums?