To me, songs come of their own volition - and with an open-ended philosophy.

I made the decision to take on board the critical feedback. Reviews are something you can easily ignore as a performer or writer but I chose to not ignore them here and I think that I benefited. I think I'm stronger for it - and I have a tougher skin as a result.

When I was young, my mother [folk singer Kate McGarrigle] brought home this recording of Verdi's Requiem and we listened to it from top to bottom. By the end of it, I was a completely different person. It was literally a requiem mass for my former self. I was about 12 or 13. The Requiem just totally hooked into what I was going through emotionally - discovering my sexuality right at the time when AIDS was devastating my community and dealing with intense parental situations.

The more hedonistic you were, the better...I very much subscribed to that as a young artist.

I'll always be a boulevardier. I have an extreme reverence and romantic longing for all that is decrepit and fatalistic.

The song is about knowing the end result of every situation you're in, and being able to play it out in your mind and see it before it happens. It's about addiction, really, about knowing how it's all going to end up. In that sense, you're watching a movie of yourself all the time - and then you want out of that movie.

All humans realize they are loved when witnessing the dawn; early morning is the triumph of good over evil. Absolved by light we decide to go on.