To my undying shame, I do read reviews. I don't read them all, but I like to get some kind of idea how things are going.

I feel like I've spent the last five years of my life on the road. It hasn't affected my songs but it's probably affected everything else about me. Obviously, the more you travel, the wilder the things that keep happening to you, the more likely it is you'll get complete strangers knocking on your hotel room door.

A rock musician's career is short-lived. To extend it, you need to do other things to keep yourself fresh.

I don't like those songs where you have to listen to a story to get into them. I don't want to have to pay attention to music in that way, I just want it to hit me in the heart and do what music's supposed to do.

Who knows their own story? It certainly makes no sense when you’re in the middle of it

Love songs come in many guises and are seemingly written for many reasons – as declarations or to wound – I have written songs for all of these reasons – but ultimately the love songs exist to fill, with language, the silence between ourselves and God, to decrease the distance between the temporal and the divine.

At school I was an anti-magnet for women.