I wanted out of my record deal with EMI. They wanted me to record one type of album; I wanted to record the type of music I wanted to make.

I always try to write about something that's actually happened or it doesn't always have to have happened to me, but it has to have happened at some point. So every single lyric that you hear comes from some kind of story that I've come across in my life. I like to think that that maybe helps me mean it a bit more and if you don't mean it, it ceases to be soul music.

I wanted out of my record deal with EMI. They wanted me to record one type of album; I wanted to record the type of music I wanted to make.

It's not a deliberate thing. It's not like I was rejecting the UK, which is what the papers said. It's just that when you spend a lot of time in your formative years around an accent, you're going to pick it up. I had been living in LA for a bit and that's what happened.

People say I'm the white Aretha Franklin. I wish I was her.

I'm just very much in love with love. I have this fairy-tale idea of what love should be, and I want it to be magical. I want everything in my life to be magical, actually. If you ever come to my house, you'll see what I mean. I've made it like a fairyland. Flowers and hearts everywhere, and there's colors and little gems hanging from the windows. I just like things to be magical if they can be, and in love there's your opportunity. I think that's how it should be, and if it's not like that, then, "Nah. Don't want it".

I like many different things you know so I'm probably going to experiment, and if I didn't I'd be a little bit strange and boring and stiff and kind of dead, and I'm very not that.