Now, the funny thing about growing up in Texas is that people who aren't from there just assume we ride horses to school and do all this weird stuff,… - Austin Mahone

I guess I was always looking beyond what was right in front of me. I wanted to listen and play music that wasn't the normal Texas thing. More than that, I wanted to see the world beyond my hometown.

So even though everything wasn't perfect for me in La Vernia, I put all my focus into the things that were going well in my life- my singing, my YouTube channel, my family, AC and my other friends. Luckily, that's the great thing about singing: It makes me forget everything else while I'm doing it.

One day when I was twelve or thirteen, I was hanging out with some friends, and I heard T-Pain for the first time. Immediately, I was like, Oh, man, what's this? This is different from what I'm used to listening to, and I love it. By this time, I wanted something new, so I started listening to more R&B and hip-hop. From there, I started listening to Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, Drake, and all those guys. At the time, I thought country and R&B were totally different worlds, but now that I actually spend most of my life singing and writing and thinking about music, I can see they're kind of similar. Before you say I'm crazy, think about this: In country music, the singers are really soulful, and you can just hear all the emotion on their voices. They mean everything they say. And R&B is the same way. It's like every note, every word, is telling you exactly how the singers feel about what they're singing about. It's just that in country music, all that feeling is usually about a truck, and in R&B, it's more often about a girl. And for me, girls are a lot more fun to sing about than a truck. All joking aside, I feel like all music is the same, when you get down to it. It's about communicating emotion. And that's what I love about it so much. I wouldn't want to spend my life any other way.