Every person I've met has influenced my songs.

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.

Being sent away to boarding school at seven is as great an inspiration as any songwriter could have - to be taken away from one's family and locked away for 10 years. It does create an incredible intensity of emotion.

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.

On the song 'Dangerous,' it feels like a teenager picking up a new instrument and writing something with all of that naive excitement.

I never really set out to do anything in the charts with music. It came as a total surprise that I did, and it's fun.

The showbiz world has to be manipulated to make it more interesting because most people's lives are boring.