I'm a Libra. That means that I can make a decision, but only after much thought.
I firmly disbelieve that one has to be a tortured soul to write good music.
Making me into a role model is placing too much importance on what I see as a work in progress.
My father is actually a quarry man - he deals in stone. He also at one point had a lot of sheep, he owned a sheep farm, but primarily the family business was in stone.
I don't loathe interviews, I'm just one of those people who makes music because I find it difficult to talk.
People like Howlin' Wolf, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, John Lee Hooker, Nina Simone, Captain Beefheart - all of these artists were what I grew up listening to every day of my life. And there's a very healthy music scene in the west country of England, where I grew up.
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 probably much more influenced by film-makers and painters than I am by other songwriters or poets.
Maybe I'm just purely lucky. If I've come up against obstacles I've always found another way around it.
People have a tendency to see country life through rose-colored glasses.
It's so much in me to want to keep experimenting all the time. It's just inherent. Therefore I keep reaching for instruments I don't particularly know how to play, and then I become excited.
My mother and father are very involved with music. It's completely part of their soul. They have an incredible record collection, all vinyl, of some of the best artists, in my eyes, that you can come across.
In order to make my solo shows as interesting as possible, I moved songs onto very different instruments so that I was moving instruments quite a lot during the set.
I'd want to read the stories that I'd written, I'd want to show the drawings that I made. That was just purely natural. So I knew I wanted to go into the arts in some way and that I'd want to show that work in some way.
I was a visual artist primarily and a writer, even from a very young age.
I literally left school and went straight into music via art college for a year, and I've been so involved in my job of writing songs that the more actively involved part became channeled into standing on the stage and saying things that way.
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.
I've always been very visceral in that I feel things very deeply.
My mom is a sculptress.
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.
