Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Use Creme de la Mer balm when your skin gets dry on a plane. You can put it on your cheeks to give your face a bit of a glow after you land.
British music lovers in general are dreadfully concerned about being cool, but I'm quite happy to grab uncool by the horns at any opportunity.
KIN' is basically a kind of rite of passage, scars-and-all celebration of going through difficult things in your life and being better for it.
My dad's a physicist and had a key to the St Andrew's observatory, and we used to pop down to see Halley's Comet and Saturn and meteor showers.
Like a lot of young people growing up in the middle of nowhere, I was desperate to leave my small town behind, but music reconnected me to my roots.
Touring is such a major sacrifice, especially as you get older, to be away from friends and family and home and any sort of routine or home comforts.
Sales have never been a source of joy for me in terms of my music. It's really about who's turning up at your shows, what people are saying about it.
When I was seventeen, I left Scotland to go to Kent, a well-to-do boarding school in Connecticut, where there was a contingent of really naughty kids.
My maternal grandmother was Cantonese, so I'm a quarter Chinese and half Irish and a quarter Scottish and raised by English parents living in Scotland.
My experience of being a singer and performer is there is something meditative and very positive about singing, just resonating the inside of your body.
When my divorce came through, it was like being let out of a cage because I hadn't been true to myself before; I was being something that was expected of me.
I have always been a great fan of albums that are cathartic and that you can listen to them together and you can relate to them as a group of people or as friends.
I used to take it much more to heart. Now I realise that negativity has almost everything to do with the person delivering it and very little to do with you yourself.
I would be happy to live in a world with no mirrors, but at the same time, it's great to look good on stage because you feel you're offering more than just the music.
When I tried to get a record deal, only one label wanted me. The rest said 'oh, we've already got a girl with a guitar.' Can you imagine them ever saying that to a guy?
It's lovely to get to say hello to people you've always admired from afar, but the fun really starts out front with people going commando whilst wearing daring mud suits.
You know there's this really strange mystique about Simon and Garfunkel, when they use the amazing mandolin and all the percussive stuff. It sometimes sounds very global.
I really enjoy tech, but I'm not voracious - I'll find stuff because I want to use it, not because I'm interested in what's out there. It's a sort of necessity relationship.
I know it sounds weird, but the kind of music I write isn't the kind of music that I listen to, which is quite underground, left-of-centre stuff like PJ Harvey and Tom Waits.
Caring about the environment has always been a big part of my life. When you grow up in a really beautiful place and you hear that it is jeopardised you want to do something.
I always thought I had a face like the moon, because I had really chubby cheeks when I was a kid, right up until my mid-20s. My face changed in my later 20s and again in my mid-30s.
I don't let housekeeping in when I stay in hotels. It cuts down on all the caustic cleaning products and aggressive water usage, and I never use the little plastic bottles of toiletries they set out.
I've always tried to avoid music being direct therapy, and I've always found there's a power when you write something that can have its own interpretation - although I'm not being intentionally evasive.
One of the main reasons that I love doing what I do is because it's unpredictable and I don't know what's coming next. When you're creating work, it's up to you whether it's an exciting experience or not.
Well, I was a real late-comer to listen to music, actually, because my parents - first of all, my parents weren't big music fans. They didn't listen to music. We didn't really listen to stuff in the house.
Of course we all break and we all cry and stumble. It's whether you allow the negative experiences to define you or shape you and make you become who you are in the best possible way. You use them as tools.
What I noticed about living by the sea when I moved to London was that it's really bad when you only have lots of other people to compare yourself to. I grew up relating to the land as well as other people.
I've always enjoyed dancing and going clubbing. I've always been interested in electronic music. I would love more than anything to see my music mutate into something that would be played in clubs. For sure.
For me, success is being happy. I used to think it was lots of houses, lots of record sales, lots of stories to tell. But some massive life changes, getting a divorce and my dad dying, led to a huge period of reflection.
I can do the vocal acrobatics but I really try not to. I've always been drawn to singers who sing it like it is, pure, straight down the line: Ella Fitzgerald, Patti Smith, Carole King. Simplicity is really important to me.
It was blazing sunshine and I went on in a turquoise neck muff, glamorous dress and muddy boots and just had the best gig, really emotional. I've had emails from people saying that they cried. They promised it wasn't the drugs.
It strikes me as very odd for someone to think, 'You know what, if I put on a bikini, I may shift some more records,' but it happens. If people are comfortable with that, fine, but it's not something that would ever cross my mind.
I've always felt at home in America. Obviously, there's down sides to everywhere - the politics of America can be hard to take but it's not great here either. I really love the country's landscape and I've travelled it many times.
It feels like your subconscious can be way ahead of you, as a songwriter. You can write a song that you think is about one thing and months later you're playing it and thinking, hang on, this is completely informing where I am now.
I work better under pressure. I was the local badminton champion when I was a kid, and there was another girl who used to thrash me for the five days leading up to the tournament and then I would just nail her to the floor in the competition.
I've always had a tendency to keep an emergency exit in a song. I can't remember ever writing a song that is completely and thoroughly depressing; there's always been a way out somehow. A sense of hope in song, regardless of the subject matter.
My father passing really, in many ways, was a gift: It made me look at my own happiness and sense of self and realize that I wasn't happy. I had checked all these boxes and achieved all this stuff that I thought made you happy. And I was miserable.
What was incredible about the Maldives was that the entire island we were on consisted of sand. There didn't seem to be any dirt. You could walk around for hours barefoot with your white trousers skimming the ground, and they'd still be pristine white.
I'm a huge fan of The Chemical Brothers and the Ninja Tune label and a lot of the stuff that they put out like DJ Shadow but I think, out of all of them, Leftism really just excited my musical brain in terms of the way that they mixed real instruments with dance tracks.
Regardless of any feedback. I love being a solo artist and having creative control. But it can be very nourishing and informative and flex very different creative muscles to work for someone else. You are essentially employed by the director. I love the challenge of that.
Albums tend to dictate what they need. Every time I have made an album it sort of feels like it is decided for me how that album is going to sound; it is not really a cerebral decision where you sit down and decide that you are going to make an album that sounds like 'this.'
I grew up thinking, 'You go to university, you get your degree, you get a job, you get married and then you have a family.' But when I got to the point in my life where I had all those things, and was looking to start a family, I was miserable. I realised I didn't want kids.
You know, we were outdoorsy types, my folks, and one of the first tapes I got, a friend gave me a cassette tape of Ella Fitzgerald singing with the Count Basie orchestra. And it was the first time, really, that someone's voice had really spoken to me, and it was just so pure.
When you make an album, you have to decide how much you want to give away; you have to decide how much you want to open up. Because the more you open up the more rewarding it can be but the more dangerous it can be. If you really open up and it gets panned it's really painful.
My songs examine and explore little specific emotions or situations or stories... They're kitchen table songs, like a conversation between me and one other person. It's almost like an alien has been sent to get emotional samples from human beings and put it all together on a record.
Support is really important to me. It's quite a responsibility when people are paying for tickets. I've spent ten years playing for free, now it's like, bloody hell people are spending a tenner and I want it to be a great show and I really don't subscribe to having a crap support band.
My parents' concern has been one of my greatest assets - I needed something to kick against. If they'd supported me every step of the way I might not have had enough fire in my belly to get where I have. Then I think: was this whole thing reverse psychology, did you really go to those lengths?
If your parents only listen to jazz or folk, you're like one of those trees you see in botanic gardens that have wire frames on them - you grow into that shape, you follow it or you have to break away from it. But I didn't have influences to embrace or kick against - I also had no idea what anything was.
I went down to London with the idea that I was going to do vocals over this crazy, crazy trip-hop digital beat. Within two or three months, I heard Hunky Dory by David Bowie and that changed me in one way, and I realized what I actually wanted was to have an E Street Band - individuals, not session musicians.
There was an obvious display of blatant sexism when I couldn't get signed. They didn't say I was ugly. They didn't say that they didn't like the music. They said I was too old! At 26! So Badly Drawn Boy, Doves, Elbow, James Blunt - you can be a gnarly old beardy bloke with a bit of a paunch and that's all right?