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.

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."

People can rock together, people can do great things together, and that's what you love when you're working with characters and it's all going well.

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

I really wanted to maintain that bedroom philosophy to creating stuff.

I wanted to make an album that I wanted to put on myself and could listen to again and again. In the past I've done these records that are very in-depth. I love them and I'm very proud of them but I've always found it hard to listen to them again and again...they're very demanding.

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.