I always write with an audience in mind. If I feel that [connection] coming back at me then I feel like I'm doing my job. That's why people come to my music - for some emotional experience or a perspective, either on their own lives, or on the world that they're living in.

I think life goes through a cycle of losing and refinding yourself all the time. Everyone has disappointments all the time, some of them pretty small, some of them pretty big.

All the music I loved as a child, people thought it was junk. People were unaware of the subtext in so many of those records but if you were a kid you were just completely tuned in, even though you didn't always say - you wouldn't dare say it was beautiful.

Now those memories come back to haunt me they haunt me like a curse.

When it comes to luck, you make your own.

I got Mary pregnant and man that's all she wrote. And for my 19th birthday, I got a union card and a factory coat.

It's hard to be a saint in the city.