Meditation is a really powerful tool I have for life now. The only reason I know about it is because I was stressing about writing and a friend taught me it. It's been useful. Now I use it for a bunch of different situations, whether I'm stressing before a show or something in the day really pisses me off.

When it's your own thing there's a lot more pressure to make it awesome, since these people bought tickets specifically for you. Whereas at the festivals, you're one of many acts on a bill so I find it's less pressure.

It's one thing having a great song, but I think for me if you take it to the next level... say you had a guitar and a vocal, and the song was amazing but the vocalist wasn't that great and it just was a guitar and vocal acoustic track, switching that to something like an amazing voice singing the exact same song with the instrumentation being really nice and lush or unique in some way and interesting and diverse... I think it's all about the instrumentation and textures in the sound.

I like your own shows because you can have a bit more fun and extend your set, you can go a bit over if you want because it's your show. Whereas at festivals it's very strict, like if you go like two minutes over they get ready to pull the plug kind-of-thing. They're both good and bad.

What's funny for me is that I made a lot of the music I make with intentions of it being a song you listen to, to chill out.

I feel like New Zealand's a bit of an unchartered territory for me in a way.

Sometimes you can just tell there's something unique about it, but you can never really truly tell until you show it to a third party - you show it to you friends, or you show it to people you know that know about music like my label or those kinda people.