I find it quite difficult to analyze my own motives for things. I tend to go with a gut feeling in the moment.

I stopped going out and taking pills and I started hanging out and learning about flat eleven chords.

I feel myself developing more and more of this soul voice, and...it's a mystery to me. Fundamentally, I just think because I feel it, it's alright.

I'm not the kind of guy who likes to rush things through. I like to take my time and finish when I'm finished.

I guess I've always had such an identity crisis when it comes to other people's understanding of me. I don't feel it in myself but from an outsider's point of view, I can see they must be thinking, "Who the hell does this guy think he is?" But recently I've been thinking, okay, a white guy can't sing soul, but would a black person be made exempt from singing opera because it's not a tradition that belongs to them? It's the same kind of argument.

You have to sit with the songs until they start to live. Or do things straight-up spontaneously. I set up a beat just like I do in the live show, add the lyrics that I wrote in thirty minutes - I already had a topic in mind because I had this crazy experience with this girl who was trying to get close to me and it freaked me out because she was really close to another friend of mine, and I thought, "This is a story, I'm gonna make this into a song."

Improvisation has been with me since I was a kid, and, taking a selfish pleasure from that, I just thought, "What the hell. It might as well be something other people enjoy."