People aren't problems to be fixed. People are people, for us to walk alongside and journey with and help pick up the pieces with and, when they drop them again, to get back down and help them pick them up again. And that's real love - without condition and without expectation.

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.

Singing was always quite a private thing... I don't think my own mum even heard me sing until after I signed with Sony just out of high school!

I learnt that music cost something, and that's a good thing. Also, that I should exercise, because I didn't and I got very sick.

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!

I often think that eventually I'd love to do some papers... my correspondence if life calms down a bit, but I think I'd do history or English literature... I've had enough of journos.

You don't normally think of Los Angeles as a place to go to get away.