Like all bands, the first two albums are always the ones most written about, and the most covered. When a band gets to their third of fourth album, the story of the band has already been told.

When you are on tour in the UK it takes a few hours to get anywhere. A lot of the time you can have a beer, close your eyes for two minutes, and then you are there. In the U.S. it is much more like a road trip as all the cities are so spread apart.

It's better for the listener to interpret their own meanings to the music.

I don't have a special place or ritual for writing songs, basically I write songs whenever an idea hits me, in my hotel room, on the road, in the plane.

It's a completely different way of working when you have your own place for recording. It's like if you were a painter, and you do loads of painting, and you just pick which paintings you want to exhibit. It's a much nicer, freer way of making work; you're not limited to anything, and you can make these cool, weird little albums.

Every song I've written, it's about what I've gone through, good or bad. It kind of comes out of me, and I'm grateful for that. I've got friends who are back home who've got no way to express that, and they're kind of in a different position in life. It's alarming to me that I've written something on my bedroom floor when I was 19 or something, and then there's 50,000 people that know the words, and they've got a similar feeling. If you thought about it too much, your head would blow up.

There's a good sarcasm and a camaraderie that comes after being in a band. And we've known each other forever. We've never been a band that fought or argued. As a songwriter, I'm really happy that the boys support me and contribute and that, but I've always wanted to be under the band Stereophonics.