I feel like the inspiration is that I've managed to change my songwriting over the past couple of years and also production styles. I could get a sense of what really worked well, and I think this sound developed naturally. That's what happens when you're doing it all the time and changing as a person. Some songs were really dark, and others were more psychedelic. It was useful to have that to figure out exactly what I wanted to do.

The music I'm playing now is the music I always imagined myself playing when I was a kid. It's been nice to use my instrument a bit more - play the guitar in a more fun way with riffs and stuff like that - rather than just propping up a whole song with a guitar and my vocals. There's so much more energy in the crowd as well; they've been bouncing around and having fun, and it's nice to feel like you're a part of something in a room rather than just performing for a crowd.

There was a criticism that stuck with me a little bit, which is that somebody said that I was jumping on a bandwagon by talking about sexuality. Obviously that's not a massive takedown, but I found that personally quite offensive because it's something that I've been living with and dealing with my whole life, and just because I decided to speak about it now is not me jumping on a bandwagon; it's a reflection of how I feel within this industry and how I've grown in the past five years.

If I look back at the songs I was writing when I was effectively a child, there's a big contrast, so I've learnt a lot along the way. I think it's a confidence thing; the biggest thing that's affected me, both in writing and performing, is a growth in confidence.

Just because you're a solo artist playing guitar, that doesn't make it folk. People get a bit confused about these things. There's so many more aspects to my music than that. Earlier on in my career, people tried to push me in that direction. They kind of wanted me to be a folky princess, which was just never gonna happen. I don't understand quite why it is, but it is very irritating that it's still happening.

There are moments on songs like "Violet" where it's still shrouded in metaphor, but it's quite, I don't know, explicit. And then there are songs like "Boyfriend," where obviously it's straight up, very, very simple. It's fun to play around with words; I really enjoy doing that, so I don't think I'll ever stop, but it's also been nice to have messages on there that I can say flat out and that people appreciate.

I have no one else involved in the writing process. I would hate to feel that I was going into the studio with something wishy-washy and not done. It's because I'm a control freak, so I want to know that everything is sorted and what's going to come out the other end, obviously with a bit of leeway.