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

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" I find lyrics can come at any time during the day, as can music. "

" All songs, all pieces of art, reflect the world that they were made in and the values of those artists and the hopes and aspirations of the people who listen to that music and who made that music. "

" Growing up in Ireland, there are a lot of aspects of God that hang in the air. And my music reflects that. "

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" If I don't think something's worth saying, I don't think it's quite there, I'd rather just not say it, to be honest. In that case, I'd rather wait 'till the thought is ready, 'till I feel like I'm happy with everything. "

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

" Love isn't any one good thing; it's a very, very strange mishmash of emotions. Your love for somebody is, oftentimes, informed by the terrible things you might believe about yourself, and comparatively, the person you see them as is everything that you're not. "

" 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. "

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" 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. "

" I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself. "

" It sounds like I'm joking when I say it, but when I wrote 'Take Me To Church' and a lot of these things, I didn't think they would be hits. I thought I was writing for a potentially smaller audience. "

" 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. "

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" 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 will play around with an idea for a very long time until it's found it's feet and it's good enough to become a song. "

" I remember writing lyrics for 'Take Me to Church' for a long time before I even had a song in mind for. It's not that I was trying to write that song for a year, but sometimes you just kind of collect lyrical and musical ideas and don't actually complete the song until you feel like they work together and have a home. "