I was finding it very difficult to find a label that understood what I wanted to do and really believed that people wanted to hear something honest and a little bit different. So, I did feel a bit like a clown. You're knocking on everyone's door trying to get them to believe what you're doing.

I wanted to make an album that melodically people can connect to; something that reflects our times and the kinds of difficulties we face.

Any song I have to work on longer than a day, I just leave it. It's not gonna work. Everything that's good is really instant.

I always knew I wanted to be a musician, and I always knew I wanted to write, 'cause the people I was listening to all wrote. I never thought it was an option to sing anyone else's songs.

I don't know if I was as ambitious as to change the world, but I do feel like - the reason why I called the album "Our Version of Events" was that I feel a lot of people are not represented in pop music and popular culture.

Melody is the first thing that comes to me when I'm songwriting. I learned piano classically first, and then I went into soul, and so melody has always been the first. It's so important.

I think on the first album, my aim was to write a good song and have a good melody, and I wanted lyrics that would connect with as many people as possible. On the second album, I took a lot more of a personal approach. I wasn't trying to make conventional, structured songs; I was really trying to get a lot of emotion and my own personal journey throughout it. I just focused more on being honest than getting the normal song structure down.