“”Tennessee” is a very important song to me. There’s a few reasons why. One is it was our first single ever for Arrested Development. And I wrote it because my older brother, his name is Terry Thomas, he and I met up in Tennessee for my grandmother – my favorite grandmother of all time – for her funeral. And that same week my brother left and went back to college, and I went back to college. And my brother died that same week. And that song was probably the first step of me recovering from the loss of two people that are just extremely close and dear to me. The chorus is “take me another place, take me to another land, make me forget all that hurts me and help me understand your plan.” It’s like a prayer to God. And just talking about sort of my journey in life, and that the last place I saw these important people in my life was in Tennessee.”Speech (18)

“The song is not based on a person named Mr. Wendal at all, but it is based on some experiences that I have had in Atlanta, which is where I live, and sung to the homeless people that I had become friends with here, and just their way of looking at it. Some of them were more like hobos where they purposely were wanting to be homeless, they didn’t want to play to the way society was going, and they just decided to go off another beaten path. Others were hungry, had a run of bad luck, and just couldn’t survive with the competition of the real world. So they were out there. One of the people that I look to the most as the real Mr. Wendal, to me, died the year that that song came out. So he never got to hear the song and the tribute to him. We gave half of the proceeds of that song to the National Coalition For the Homeless in the United States, because of how closely all of us felt to the cause of the homeless, and the fact that everybody, whether they’re homeless or not, there’s some times in all of our lives when we need some help, we need a boost.”Speech (18)

“It came from real life experiences. At that time I lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which is where I was born. And Milwaukee, back in those days, was a very conservative town. And a lot of the black people there really were not into cultural black… they understood they were black, but for them black was jheri-curls, it was pimping, and that’s what they thought black culture was mainly about. For me having experienced more in Atlanta and having traveled a little bit more, I’d come to understand that black culture had a lot more to do with Africa, and it was different hairstyles that we could express ourselves with, like dreadlocks and braids. So I would dress like that, and a lot of the people around me in Milwaukee would sort of mock it. And so the song was really just talking about this tension between one concept of culture and another concept of culture.”Speech (18)