Shaffer Chimere Smith (born October 18, 1979), known professionally as Ne-Yo, is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, dancer, and actor.
There wasn't a lot of R&B cats doing songs at 120 beats per minute before 'Closer,' which I take full credit and responsibility for. That's all good, but it was an experiment. You experiment with something, if it goes good, cool, but you never forget where you come from and R&B is where I come from.
The essence of being a gentleman is to understand the way you're supposed to treat a respectable woman.
Fear is a healthy part of success.
If you want to be successful, you have to be the best person doing it. And in order to be the best person doing it, you have to get your work ethic right and keep going.
My style is mainly about comfort. It has to be comfortable, it has to lay right on me, know what I mean?
She's super sexy everybody wanna know bout her and the one that everybody want, but no one's ever got her. Because the way she get it in all of the men, even the women all try, all try.
Grab somebody sexy, tell the hey!
I always refer back to the days of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, the Rat Pack. Back when everyone wore a suit because that's what it was to be an entertainer. You were stylish and you were fly, and it was an effortless fly.
For the first few years of my life my mom used to cut my hair so there were a lot of bowl-cut hair styles
What is hot now will not be hot tomorrow, I promise you. Trends are made to die. It's the truth.
I feel there is always room for good music. I want to reach people's soul with my lyrics through whatever vessel God chooses.
I probably wouldn't be singing if not for Michael Jackson. When I started singing, I didn't like my tone until my mom put me on to Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder, so listening to the way they used their instrument helped me get more comfortable with my own.
I do not cook. However, if I did, I'd cook all Italian food, all the time.
A lot of time we don't get into politics because we don't believe anything you're saying and we can't understand what you're saying because we ask you question and you tap dance around the issue so much that we forget what we asked.
Women wanted to be viewed as equals to men. So men were like, 'You wanna be viewed as equal to me, then open your own damn door. ' But I still don't view it as an excuse to be an a**hole.
I honestly don't feel that it's my music that's under-appreciated. I think that it's me that's under-appreciated. As an artist, period.
That is the difference between a good song and a bad song lyrically - if you can listen to it and put yourself in that place, or see that person in that place, normally it is a pretty good song.
What I definitely learnt from Michael Jackson is that simple is almost always better. As a songwriter, as an artist period.
I named my album Year of the Gentleman. Just looking at how the essence of what it is to be a gentleman is very much lacking nowadays. Someone said to me that chivalry is dead, and I hated to have to agree, but it's true.
My mom was the picture of the blue-collar mom: Two and three and four jobs to make sure that me and my sister never needed, that was her thing