The biggest thing I take away from the Army is that work ethic and being able to focus and put your eyes on a goal.
I'm not the guy to get big record company budgets. My budget is Britney Spears' catering money.
I want to build a fanbase. I want people to like my albums even more so than singles.
When you see a Jamaica video, it's always the hood. Everybody in the video's got guns, and the world looks at it like that's what Jamaica's about. And it affects the economics of the music.
I have mixed feelings about Napster. I like what it can do for an unsigned band. It can help them sell 10,000 records. But for an established artist, there's already so much piracy around. They need to regulate it.
'Lucky Day' is what I would call the Shaggy roller-coaster ride. It takes you to different moods. I listen to music in moods.
I'm inspired by day to day life, things that people go through, things that make people tick. Everybody has a story, so you try to put stories into songs and try to make it as entertaining as possible.
You might be like, 'I want really big hits.' But when you get really big hits, and your label is making $150 million, they are people who are now interested in what you do. They are going to begin to tell you what to do, and so you become important. So your creative freedom - you're not going to have that again.
I think the reason I got into the music business was basically for the live aspect of it.
Music, music, music. It doesn't get much better than that! It pretty much consumes my life.
The thing about Shaggy's records are those records are very timeless.
If I'm not on tour, then I'm sometimes laying down four or five records at a time.
India is a great place.
I fought for this country.
I used to do three or four songs a day, just write them - boom, boom, boom, and done - because of how spontaneous I was.
I'm no stranger to making timeless music.
I constantly tour every year, around the clock. That's how I make my living, and I do very well. Because I have classic songs.
I live in Kingston. When I tell people I live in Kingston, they start fearing for my life. People ask me if I have Internet in Jamaica. Like, seriously?
I did a record with Janet Jackson, and it went to the top of the charts, and we had all of these complications, and she couldn't be in the video and couldn't do anything for the record. I went through something similar with Pitbull. I think it works really well for a lot of other artists, but for me, it just doesn't work that well.
The Police, they were the guys that were like the gateway to the mainstream. In England, there was a very strong reggae movement that was going on. Anything that was happening in reggae happened out of England. They were brilliant. They could spot a sound that was cool, the 'it' sound.
