School was a very cruel environment and I was a loner. But I learnt to get hurt and I learnt to cope with it.
Quite often, lyrics get misunderstood – and I never mind that. I guess what all artists want is for their work to touch someone or for it to bethought provoking.
All we’re ever looking for is another open door.
I think snow is so evocative and has such a powerful atmosphere.
When I’m writing I’ve been playing something for a couple of hours and I’m almost in a trance. At two or three in the morning you can actually see bits of inspiration floating about and grab them.
There is magic within, there is magic without. Follow me and you’ll learn just what life’s all about.
Irish folk is probably the biggest influence musically that I’ve ever had. My mother’s Irish. And when I was very young, both my brothers were very into traditional music, English and Irish. They were always playing music, so I was always brought up with it.
Clowns are always creepy!
It was obvious that computers were going to become more a part of our lives, and they will continue to unless something dramatic happens to change that.
I think what is great is that if anything that I do is interesting to somebody else, then I really don’t think it matters at all what I had originally intended.
I could find faults with all my albums because that’s just a part of being an artist – it’s hard being a human being, isn’t it?
I love words, I think they’re fascinating and incredibly wonderful things and part of the joy of my work is that I not only get to work with music but also with words. Sometimes it’s a difficult process but a lot of the time it’s really fun.
My father was always playing the piano. He played all kinds of music – Gershwin, all kinds of stuff. He was really a hugely encouraging force to me when I was little.
I don’t think a lot of people listen to their old stuff, do they? I spent a long time making it, so I don’t really want to spend much time listening to it again.
The great thing about vinyl is that if you wanted to get a decent-sounding cut, you could really only have 20 minutes max on each side. So you had a strict boundary, and that was something I’d grown up with as well. Also, you were able to have different moods on each side, which was nice.
Sometimes when I look back on myself on those earlier records, there was so much effort going in, so much trying. With this, I was trying to make it much more laid back.
I think I was just lucky to be brought up in a very musical family. My two older brothers were, and still are, very musical and very creative, and music was a big part of my life from a very young age, so it is quite natural for me to become involved in music in the way that I did.
It’s funny when you write a song – it’s easy for me now – but there’s almost a second stage where you take control of the song. You start writing it, and if you’re not careful, it just finishes itself and it might not be what you wanted. It’s very strange, it takes over itself. It has its own life.
I like to work with a combination of analog and Pro Tools. I love the sound of analog tape, but there’s so many things you can do with Pro Tools that would be incredibly difficult and very time-consuming with analog.
It’s not that I don’t like American pop; I’m a huge admirer of it, but I think my roots came from a very English and Irish base. Is it all sort of totally non-American sounding.
I’d become very involved in the production, so the albums were taking longer. So it was never a deliberate decision not to do live shows. A few times, I’ve thought about doing them again, but it’s just kind of never happened. I’ve just sort of gone the path of becoming a recording artist I guess.