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

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" It's a very, very interesting experience to be talking to people who are such icons in their own right. When Adele came to a show, I was just talking to her, and at the time, I thought, 'I'm just having a chat with somebody.' But then I heard myself say, 'Oh, I was talking to Adele the other day,' and it's as strange as you'd imagine. "

" One of my favorite books is 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell, and 'Catcher in the Rye,' obviously, is a big influence and is one of my favorites. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm influenced a lot by Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, even Paul Weller - Billie Holiday as well: People who wrote and sang songs that were reflective of their times. I quite like that. I quite admire that. "

" It was amazing for me to even perform at the Grammys, but to do so alongside Annie Lennox was a truly incredible honor. "

" I just hate getting my hair cut. "

" I don't like false happy endings, and I don't think the real world is such a forgiving place. "

" I love a lot of Irish folk music and Irish folk songs. "

" By the time I was in my teens, I was listening to Delta blues and jazz. "

" It's a surreal experience filming promotion with Ryan Seacrest and meeting Top 40 pop artists. "

" The way I did the first album... the way I wrote 'Church'... was just to trust my instincts with the music and let it kind of do what it does. "

" To be honest, the biggest reason I write music and became a musician was to create the amount of joy that I felt about music to anyone else. To me, that's a job well done. "

" 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. "

" Anyone close to me will be familiar with my frustrations with certain aspects of social media: the behaviour it encourages and attitudes towards the self it can breed. "

" 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. "

" When you play to an audience, you come away energized. It's the promo that really breaks an artist. Some lad sitting on a box trying to create a drum sound in a dry little studio. Everyone goes, 'Great - okay, now on with my day.' You go back to the bus, and you weep. "

" I don't know if I'll ever get married. I have no plans to not get married. "

" Religion wasn't imposed on me. "

" I found the experience of falling in love or being in love was a death: a death of everything. You kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way, and you experience for the briefest moment - if you see yourself for a moment through their eyes - everything you believed about yourself gone. In a death-and-rebirth sense. "

" I'm uncomfortable with selfies and status updates documenting mundane pieces of my life, which I don't think should be of interest to anyone else. "

" I think marriage is a scary concept. It's a scary concept for anybody. I'm not sure where I sit with that. "

" I have very strong feelings about a lot of things. I am sometimes reluctant to come straight to the forefront with it. You know, first and foremost, I'm a musician. I'm a songwriter. "

" For me growing up, I had a Christian upbringing, and I just noticed this Catholic influence in school. "

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

" I used to almost not look forward to recording, because it was like, 'Okay, what am I going to have to sacrifice?' "

" 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 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. "

" Being 16 is the worst time to be anybody, there is not enough tea in China to persuade me to be that young again. I wasn't very happy with myself. "

" Regardless of the sexual orientation behind a relationship, it is still a relationship and still love. "