You can analyze all you want but you can never explain away the God factor. Sometimes God just decides to breathe on something and it's completely His prerogative.

At sixteen I was like: "I need to get an album out now!" - even though I was only sixteen. I was always in a little bit of a rush to be an adult.

I had a pretty regular childhood, with a rad mum who taught me to love reading and thinking and laughing, and (as far as I was concerned) a regular dad who drove trucks for a living and did radio interviews on weekends and got stopped in the street a lot when we went out.

You can analyze all you want but you can never explain away the God factor. Sometimes God just decides to breathe on something and it's completely His prerogative.

I had received some minor indie label interest when I was 14 after I was in a schools music competition thing in NZ called 'Rockquest', but I knew it wasn't the right time and that I wasn't good enough and needed to concentrate on school.

Then Jesus introduced Himself to me. Though my birth certificate reads 1983, I reckon I was born in 1999, when I met Jesus - not in a church or on a camp or through people, but alone in my bedroom with an open Bible and a tangible revelation that the Son of God was not only real, but alive and awesome and stronger than the chains that bound me.

I began dabbling in writing when I was 12, and there was never an official start to singing... I just sang my songs because there was no one else to sing them and no one told me to shut up!