It's good to feel excited by the environment you're in.

I decide immediately if I like a person and if I do, then I'm myself, and if I don't, then I give nothing.

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

There is nothing more boring than doing singing exercises.

I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.

There's so much you can do with laying words on a bed of music. You can completely change their meaning with the type of music or the way they're sung.

And all of these writers offer me a greater understanding of what it is to be alive, and that is such an incredible thing art can do for other people. It made me want to try and get close to this strange, mysterious thing that people can do with words.