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" I've been a total Tom Waits dork for a long, long time. "

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" I think all that we would know of America back home is foreign policy, and maybe the snippets of the madness of political culture. "

" When I write songs, I try to remove myself a little bit. Obviously, they're very personal to me, but it feels easier if I feel like I'm writing characters. "

" 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. "

" There are a lot of recurring themes that I resonated with when I read 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.' "

" 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. "

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

" You grow up and recognize that in any educated secular society, there's no excuse for ignorance. You have to recognize in yourself, and challenge yourself, that if you see racism or homophobia or misogyny in a secular society, as a member of that society, you should challenge it. You owe it to the betterment of society. "

" The best vocalists I can think of are female. "

" I'm always eager to make new music. "

" There are a few Irish writers who have a very strong influence on me, especially on the 'Take Me to Church' EP. "

" I was definitely drawn to the mythology of one man, one voice, and one guitar. "

" I always thought of myself as a very, very obscure artist. "

" 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. "

" I was never academically driven in English, but, again, Tom Waits is a perfect example of an influence. He writes so immaculately and paints so perfectly a world and the characters within it. There are writers like that who are my influences: vivid and gifted storytellers. "

" I feel my duty is to make music. "

" I just hate getting my hair cut. "

" I didn't even have that many close LGBT friends or anything like that, but I suppose it was growing up and becoming aware of how you are in a cultural landscape that is blatantly homophobic... you turn around and say, 'Why did I grow up in a homophobic place? Why did I grow up in a misogynistic place?' "

" 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. "

" I think it all started with Nina Simone. When I was maybe seven or eight, I used to listen to one of her albums every night before I went to sleep. For me, her voice was everything. "

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

" We have such a culture of discrimination and hatred, and one that has scapegoats and affects people so extremely. That's something that very easily crosses borders. "

" The more I come to L.A., the more it's amazing. "

" I'm not quite used to being seen through the eyes of fans yet. Being met with squeals and screams - I haven't gotten used to that. "

" 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. "

" Either somebody has equal rights, or they don't. And certainly in the Irish constitution, marriage is genderless. There's no mention of a man and a woman. "

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

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