There is no formula to it because writing every song, for me, is a little journey. The first note has to lift you and make you go, 'What's this?' You play C, but why is it that one day it leads to G and it didn't yesterday? I don't know. It's everything. It's the walk you take in the morning, it's the night before, the meeting with people, landscapes, the chats, all of that evolves in some way into melody, but I'm not sure how it's going to happen. I'm dealing with the unknown all the time and that is exciting.

I do a so-called trip into myself: I sit down at the piano and the melody might start to evolve from my playing or then I might start to sing it.

My influences are with Irish music, church music and classical music.

Singing in Gaelic is very, very natural to do. I think lends itself very much so to being sung.

The success of Watermark surprised me. I never thought of music as something commercial; it was something very personal to me.

Over in the UK, the music press can be brutal. They can say wonderful things about you one week, and the next week, you're in the can.

We called the album 'Amarantine' to mean everlasting. Poets use the word to describe an everlasting flower and I loved the image of that.