TODDZERO: My second album "Kid Heart" came out sounding the way I wanted it to and I'm very proud of the songs. I've been busy playing live shows and gearing up to take some of these songs to radio. Additionally, I'm constantly writing and am excited to get back into recording mode soon. More music will be out late 2013 or early 2014, God willing.

TODDZERO: I figured out -- after the fact -- that there are several other artists named "ToddO" and I wanted to avoid confusion by picking something a little more unique. Plus the domain name toddzero.com was available so I nabbed that as well.

TODDZERO: The immensity of writing and producing a full-length album by yourself and without label support is daunting. There were some times when I only barely made it through by sheer force of will power. It's hard. And when you get stuck -- which I did many times -- it gets discouraging. Self-doubts constantly creep in. "Is this song any good?" "What if I can't find a good bridge?" "Does my voice suck?"

I suppose the main differences were just the amount of time required to pull together ten songs versus "only" seven. And then to come up with some sort of unifying theme or narrative thread was another challenge. The "1234567 EP" was named, quite lazily, because there were seven songs. This time around, I wanted something a little more meaningful and related to the songs themselves. Thankfully, the song "Kid Heart" came along at the 11th hour and I had my direction.

TODDZERO: By the time I was done writing and recording this collection of songs, it was clear that two main themes had appeared. It wasn't a conscious decision but I could objectively see that my songs came in basically two flavors: personal/autobiographical songs and biblical stories. The thought occurred to me that maybe I should release two EPs instead of a full-length. But at the end of the day I went the full-length route. I'm thinking that in the future, however, I may stick to just EPs. In other words, collections of three to seven songs.

TODDZERO: I wanted to write an inspiring, upbeat song that could be sung by both believers and non-believers. I'd love if this song were sung in churches. But I'm crazy enough to think that this song could be sung by thousands of people at sporting events too, along the same lines as "We Are the Champions" by Queen. Just recently, a television station here in Los Angeles picked it up for their nightly sports cast, so maybe it has some potential.

Thematically, it's a song that speaks against fear. I like that old saying that goes something like, "Fear knocked on the door. Faith answered it and found nothing there." So with my lyrics for "We Will Win," I tried to tell a story of overcoming fear and then culminating with the anthemic "we will win" chorus. It's a tall order to try to do so much within one song, to be sure, but at least I went for it.

TODDZERO: Well, first, some people would call being "on your own label" akin to having no label at all. I'd say my least favorite part is having only my own limited resources to tap into for recording, marketing and touring support. I mean, I'm the guy who hired a gospel choir to sing on 10 songs. That's not cheap. When I play live, I even have a small choir come with me. I'm so grateful to be able to do that but everything I've done has been self-funded. Now, the opposite side of that coin -- the part I like the best -- is that I'm not beholden to anyone. I am not on the hook to recoup any album or touring budgets to a third party entity. No matter what the sales are or aren't, I know I'm not going to get dropped.

TODDZERO: That up until 2010, I hadn't written a song in many, many years. Music was my passion for so long, then I took a long detour and shelved songwriting for a number of years. I'm feeling very inspired these days and maybe that has to do with the fact that I saved it up for so long. Also, that might be partially why I feel I have a lot of ground to make up and am constantly striving to get my music out there.

TODDZERO: Patience. "Waiting on the Lord" is neither easy nor fun but apparently it's one of His biggest tools in his tool belt to get people to grow. And I feel like He's using it on me a lot these days.