I think it's important to just be in your subconscious mind - at least when you're starting an idea.

You may be surprised to know that growing up, I wanted to be a writer of children's books.

I was very conceptual about what I was doing; I had the first five albums planned out, and all the songs on every album, and the artwork. I always had these ambitious musical projects in mind.

The moment you're too apologetic about something and people know that something isn't finished, they listen/look for the mistakes or cracks, but if you act like it's done people experience things in a totally different way.

A lot of my ideas come from McNally Jackson bookstore. One of my favorite things to do is just go there and look through architecture books and interior design books. Something about the aesthetics of space and beautiful images works with my brain.

I labour over details and whether a song should be a straight pop song form or exploratory. This is the curse with doing things by yourself.

When I think back, I felt like I had the life that a lot of white American kids grew up with in the suburbs in the States. I started noticing, as Apartheid's grip weakened, that we had more and more black kids at school; I had more and more black friends. But I never really saw a separation between myself and the black kids at school.