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" Loads of verses don't make it into the finished song. "

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" I fell in love with the legend of Paul Robeson as a kid. My dad would tell me all these amazing stories about his life and, bizarrely, ended up singing to Robeson on his deathbed. "

" In my mind, there's usually a fairly definitive kind of narrative when I write. But I don't want to enforce that on other people. I think that's why I like using metaphor so much. "

" The moment you have children, it's like your heart gets out of your body, puts on clothes, and walks away. "

" I first came across Langhorne Slim when I saw him play live, and he's an incredibly infectious performer. The way he works the crowd is mind-blowing. You can listen to his music without really listening to his lyrics, but it pays off if you do. "

" I don't really write songs. They're just there anyway, chiseling away at the atmosphere, and suddenly they're like, 'Oh, thanks for coming. Thanks for finding me. We'll share each other now.' "

" My father was an actor. Both of my older brothers are actors. My younger sister is an actress. For me, that's my job; that's my craft. But then all through school and through drama school, I was gigging and running nights and playing in bands, and I just didn't want to let that go. "

" Certain films should only be watched at 40,000 feet. Like, certain comedies and certain, uh, emotionally charged movies. "

" Weirdly, my dad didn't want me to become an actor, he was always quite resistant to it. He told me as much many times. That just made it more attractive to me. "

" I actually do bits of my writing in sort of incidental spaces - when I'm traveling on the Tube or on a bus. More often than not, it's a reaction to how you feel about something, and if you're sitting down and concentrating on, 'I must write something,' then you can't have a truthful reaction. "

" It's interesting to marry American musical traditions with the subtlety of English-style storytelling and folk singer-songwriters like Martin Carthy and Bert Jansch - they're two heritages that are distinct but also cross over on so many levels. "

" The Band mean a lot to me in terms of what I aspire to achieve with my group, as the music they made went against the fashion of the time. "

" I think everyone in their 30s looks back at their 20s and thinks, 'Oh God, if I'd just done this and this, and not done that.' "

" My dad was working class. "

" I imagine that, for most people, acting isn't something they think is a viable option, whereas for me, it was the most viable option. No adults around me knew how to do anything else. "

" It's great being an actor and being part of a play or a film where there's usually quite a big group of people who are collaborating, and your job is really to fit in and share that energy. With music, because I write the songs, it's a broader, more abstract process. "

" The pop industry is so well-practised at channelling young people's creative energy that I think it gets abused. "

" I've never done anything like 'Brotherhood' before. It was a great challenge to take up a part in a live audience sitcom - it was amazing. "

" When I was young, I was being pushed, against my will, towards becoming a classical musician. I had music scholarships; I had to play the violin and do orchestra practice and that sort of stuff. That meant I didn't get to do any school plays. I desperately wanted to do that. "

" I had a series of jobs in the small fishing village in West Wales where my family lived when I was a teenager. I worked as a fisherman in the day, and then the skipper and his wife ran a small restaurant - she'd cook the fish he caught. "

" I did a lot of theater as a young actor in my early twenties, and my first few records really came from writing songs through the rehearsal processes. "

" There's something amazing about 'Fawlty Towers' and 'The Office' only being two series. I think, when you really nail it, you don't need to do more than two or three. "

" I find it hugely exciting to be dealing with another writer's language. "

" Taking someone else's language and fitting it into your own speech - you learn a lot about other people's brains, doing that. "

" I really love a lot of early Sixties R&B, rock n' roll, and I love performing songs that have that power and soulfulness. "

" I sometimes self-edit when it comes to auditions and go, 'They're not going to cast me, so I'm not going to do it.' "

" The world that I know and the world that I come from is from the arts, and my wife's an artist, and I've been a musician since I left college, and there's tons of musicians I'd love to play. "

" I grew up playing classical violin and a lot of Bach and Mozart and the things that Einstein loved. "

" Folk music - and what people are now perceiving as being folk music - is music that's quite close to the ground. The songs sound quite old, even if they're new. They sound like they've been sung by different people for years. "

" I think the two are kind of synonymous for me; songwriting is like my form of diary making. It's how I process the world. Without doing that, I feel kind of lost. The characters that I play often come out in the songs and the challenges that they face, albeit in an abstract way. "

" I'm not that politically educated. "