I am a dreamer but when I wake, you can't break my spirit, it's my dreams you take

To come home and share life experiences with friends is the key to what makes me feel really alive.

Ladies love a soppy lyric. There's a real winner in 'Carry You Home'.

I don't know how to write without thinking what people would want. You don't know whether they want you to be black or white, so you kind of get a gray, something in the middle.

Sometimes, reading my own media, the negativity can upset me, but I just deal with things on a positive basis. I mean, I have up to 20,000 people singing my words back to me on a nightly basis - they share my hopes and fears, and they relate to my own life experiences. Life can be pretty isolating, but that connection is always amazing.

There's a lot of music nowadays with people singing about how amazing their clothes are and how incredible their shoes are and how much jewelry they might be wearing or how much jewelry they want, how much money they have and the club that they're in and the alcohol that they're drinking. I think that's showing off. I don't think it's necessarily all that honest or all that interesting.

And the one job my father knew of, that he'd had experience of himself, was the Army, so he could help me in that direction.