“I really learned how to sing growing up in the Pentecostal [church]. That’s all about the music [and] raising the hands in the air, and I think that’s where I started to pick up harmonies and understand what that meant. And then I started singing in seventh grade in the youth group and I was very shy, but church felt like a good place to start because it wasn’t scary, it was like a safe house, and I really learned how to sing at church.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
“I took him home. He’s a New Yorker, and he was like, ‘Why are there so many churches everywhere?’ [I was like], the South. That’s just how it is. There’s a church on every corner.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n