The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror - not the glamour and sophistication the pushers in the tobacco industry try to portray.

Singing is a trick to get people to listen to music for longer than they would ordinarily.

There's still a feeling that uncensored emotions make a good song. They don't. Pure emotion is just somebody screaming at you, or crying. It doesn't communicate anything. It has to be mediated with some skill and craft, in order to communicate it to a second, a third, or a fourth person. That doesn't make it any less real. And it doesn't make it any less true. But it does mean that, yeah, it's the combination that makes it work.

I think it's really hard to make songs that pursue an agenda. You can kind of do it a little bit through a character, so the character gives voice to something or their story, the story of the character tells you something, but, for me anyway, it's really hard to write directly about politics.

I'm just an advertisement for a version of myself.

I came to New York to be a fine artist - that was my ambition.

I've rarely seen video screens used well in a music concert.