The upside to smoking is that you get to be social. I was looking for a light when I bumped into Ben Harper's manager. A couple of days later, Ben and I were in the studio.

I want it to be more universal than that - like a painter doesn't have to explain his life story away to justify his painting.

I get told I'm a confessional songwriter, which gets on my tits because I think of negative connotations attached to the word "confessional". I don't like the idea of songwriting being therapy. I don't want to put myself so directly in the foreground.

I love the water more than anything. I'm not very good at sunbathing - I get really bored. I love swimming and I love being like a fish and getting in the sea and just - I don't know, it feels right.

You can have all sorts of relationships, but there's something with musicians working together where you can have relationship that can just continue to grow in a beautiful way.

To me songwriting is more like redemption. I can extract the poison or the pollen, the essence from a situation and the rest becomes a husk that blows away.

I've also been writing with my guitarist, Ted Barnes, and he's amazing. Writing with him has taught me a lot about my own writing process, in the sense that it's incredably personal to write with someone else from scratch.