Elvis Presley's music never meant anything to me. Mambo was the music I loved - it spoke to me.

My music isn't anything but me. It has jazz in it, and rock'n'roll, and it has an urgency to it.

Rick Ross is bigger to me than Dizzee Rascal. My music is more gangsta rap than anything English.

I don't listen to music while writing; it seems to me I'm trying to make my own kind of music, and to have anything else going on is just noisy interference.

I didn't think it was fair to my music to label me as the daughter of somebody - I didn't think it described me very well and I didn't think it had anything to do with my music.

Because, when I'm making music, I don't think about anything, you know? All I think about is what I want to hear. So that for me is what I want - I want my head to be constantly being rearranged.

As for what I listen to after writing, it could be anything - but I've noticed that if the current book contains music from one tradition, it is music from another tradition that most relaxes me.

Usually, when I do a soundtrack, the music from the movie doesn't have anything to do with me personally. It's music to enhance to the film. My own stuff is more introspective and about what's on going in my head.

Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue.

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