The first time I heard Tom Waits, it was like everything just flipped. It was just this fascination with him. My cousin showed me 'Small Change,' and I just couldn't get over that this was a white guy singing.

My hair grows into a fuzz ball - I just wanted it to grow downwards rather than outwards - but then I realized I couldn't play guitar with it that way. I couldn't do anything day-to-day without my hair getting in my mouth or my eyes or my food, so I just started tying it back, long before I knew what a man bun was.

I try to be happy. I try to face things without regret or make sure that I'm happy with things and leave nothing unsaid if I can.

The best vocalists I can think of are female.

I spent quite a bit of time in choirs, growing up, and in the world-touring music group Anuna.

I feel my duty is to make music.

Biggest musical influences would be people like Nina Simone and Tom Waits. A huge amount of writers like Leslie Feist and Paul Simon.

I figured the songs wouldn't make much of a splash. I didn't think 'Take Me To Church' would play on the radio or get in the charts, and I didn't think about dealing with a global audience.

Growing up, I always saw the hypocrisy of the Catholic church. The history speaks for itself, and I grew incredibly frustrated and angry. I essentially just put that into my words.

No Facebook status is as worrying as a vote and no tweet is as noticeable as an angry cry from a crowd outside a government building.

Governments do not care about your Facebook-assembled opinion. Incompetent politicians don't read your tweets; there are reasons for them being out of touch. Change does not come about for 'likes' on a page, though the ideas for it may start there.

I think my parents took me to see Sting when I was very, very young.

I didn't know what to expect of real America. What shocked me was the diversity of it and how different every city is. But also just how polite and usually good-willed and optimistic most Americans are.

I love Muddy Waters and Nina Simone. I also watched 'The Blues Brothers' movie over and over.

I had just discovered jazz, and I started singing in a kind of blues cover band at the age of 15. We called ourselves - it was a terrible name - the Blue Zoots. We couldn't actually get our hands on zoot suits, nor did we dress in blue. We did covers of Screamin' Jay Hawkins and kind of Blues Brothers repertoire stuff.

A lot of the 'leave' campaign was centered around a thinly veiled xenophobia, just 'control our own borders.' It's not a good look. I don't think it represents Britain; I don't think it represents the U.K. all too well. It breaks my heart for my generation in Britain who are going to suffer.

Social media is an advertisement for the superficial extroverted self.

There is no singer I can think of who can touch Ella Fitzgerald. And when Billie Holiday sings, she's merciless about it. Her voice has just this immaculate sadness - even in happy songs, there was something that was so broken about it.

One of my biggest influences of all time would be somebody like Tom Waits. David Bowie is another huge influence. I'm also a big fan of St. Vincent and Leslie Feist.

I have a bit of a love affair with fairy tales and some of the ideas of Irish mythology, like Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, who captured a lot of that very beautifully.

I had a fascination with the roots of African American music. That would have been my first education in music. I had a real passion for it. I wanted to play it, sing it. I could sing at a young age, but I started to teach myself bass guitar and started writing when I was 15.

I think it is important to differentiate between lip service towards something and actually making change.

Rarely do I finish a song lyrically before I have a musical idea there, but then again, rarely ever would I finish a song musically before starting the lyrical ideas. So a lot of the time, they come in tandem, or they just come at a glance.

I tried to avoid anything that caused me frustration or grief or duress. I played FarmVille and procrastinated like all teenagers.