I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.

I find it hard myself to feel justified to sing in a very politically direct way about war or social conditions because I feel so ignorant of a lot of it.

I also like a lot of silence, and when you're touring, it's constantly noise, all the time, you're surrounded with 15 or 20 people the entire time. I find that tough.

I would never feel confident enough to express my views and opinions as the right ones because I just don't think that's possible. There are so many sides to everything that nobody is right or wrong.

In the same way, I write some of my more difficult pieces when I'm at very happy stages in my life.

Maybe you're a singer or not, but what taps into the soul leads to the heart, and that's really what I came away with, with the starting point for the record being that I could speak as a human being and feel things very deeply.

I think that's always very valuable: to keep the mind open to receiving all sorts of information, which can then be used in my work, but also just as a human being.