I wish I could be more serious about painting. I think there may be something going on there and I should pursue it. I'm very old-fashioned - even with the music. I realize, while I have so much respect for the kookiness of people who go for it, who paint with their eyes closed, I am superclassical.

Acting seems much easier than singing, in fact, because you are putting on a costume - whereas here you are taking everything off.

Yeah, you always have to be there and remind people of you. It's complicated when you do music, or when you do anything in general. You need time. I don't know if it's because of the weather or what, but [Canadians] seem to have a relationship to time that I like very much.

I was kind of ashamed of my bourgeois family as a teenager, I guess - I had dreadlocks, shopped in thrift stores and pretended I had no money. At that time, I would have spat on a girl who was buying Yves Saint Laurent.

I have a huge scarf from Hermes that I bought the day I signed my record deal. I had never had an Hermes scarf. And I ran to buy one, thinking, Now, this is a symbol, I need one, I need an Hermes scarf, which actually now Im quite embarrassed about. Most of the time I twist it so much that no one notices it, and just bundle it around me.

It took me so long to get to the music, where that was what I wanted to do all my life. It took me so long to realise that it wasn't really movies that I wanted to do, but to be on stage singing.

I was shocked when I looked at art schools in France. There's only one left that does anatomy. Now they do video. They do editing. I would go to film school if I wanted to do video and editing. In art school, it's only new mediums. It's three-dimensional or computer. I found that shocking. No nudes.