My love of R&B and hip-hop has influenced my life not even as a musician, but generally in terms of growing up and looking to America as an inspiration.

I'm not an L.A. guy. I don't take meetings - you know what I mean? I don't really know how to interact very well with people in L.A. because everybody's got an agenda and everybody's like, "What do you do?" "Where are you going?" Or it's like, "What do you know?" And I'm not on a grind - I was there to make music and to meet people but I wasn't hustling for anything.

When I started out making music I thought it was about thrills and adding layers, but I realized I want to focus on saying the most with the least.

I'm an introspective human being and someone who likes to be alone in a room. The idea of going out and talking to people...there's something appealing about it, but also there's something that feels alien to me, as a cynical Irish man.

With music, it feels natural that, in my head, I can pull things apart and then put them back together very quickly.

It's like half the campaign of selling a record is trying to convince people that you're an artist. Well, I am an artist. This is what I do.

Music is really everything I know. To be honest every experience I've ever had has been brought up from music and everything I do is because of music. I don't know anything else, I think about music before I go to sleep and it just really is everything that I am.