My parents are on the other side of the world in Rwanda. They retired and moved back there with my little brother. To me part of the fun of hip-hop has always been this game of explaining who you are and being proud of who you are. As the world gets bigger .. I think maybe, on a subconscious level, it makes me to reach out to those places to get a clearer sense of who I am.

I tried to have an alias when I first started: 'Catfish'. It only worked for like a month. I was always considering myself 'Shad' when I was rapping.

I think people expect something genuine and inspired. I wanted to do something a little more ambitious and to push myself in every respect. But my albums are pretty similar. They boil down to my journey.