I wouldn’t know what to say, really - I suppose I’d apologize for doing it if you don’t want me to! (Laughs) It’s weird because people say all those things, like “What do you think you’re doing?” and it’s like, well, I just sit in my room and whatever comes into my head I just bring them out, and if enough people like them, you can’t just keep them to yourself. What are you gonna do - - write these songs and have everyone wanting to listen to them and finding inspiration in them but say, “Oh, no, I’m not gonna play these songs until I’m 31 because it won’t make sense till then!”? (Laughs) I think that because I’m so full of angst or whatever - so full of emotion - - the songs come out just pure with feeling. It isn’t an intelligence thing; I’m not trying to be clever. I don’t think of it as poetry because it wouldn’t make sense without the heartfelt vocals. And what I’m singing is important. The lyrics have got to have meaning and the song’s got to have feeling as well.

When I say angst it can be good angst, too, because God knows there’s plenty of joyousness in your songs.

It’s relief as well. I think people misconstrue sad lyrics as, “You must’ve written them when you were feeling really depressed…” But most of them were written a few weeks after something’s happened, when you’re getting over it and looking to something, looking to the future.

When you’ve got hope.

Yes, hope.

The artists who have influenced you are pretty eclectic and impressive and I’m wondering how you came to be aware of them.

I think one of the turning points for me was when my brother recorded the Neil Young MTV "Unplugged" performance from the TV. My brother is eight years older than me and he was starting to get into things like that. I remember Neil Young sat at this massive organ - - almost like in a church, a proper big pipe organ - - playing "Like a Hurricane" and it just took me aback that someone could have that sort of impact. And he just sat there getting on with it and hardly spoke between songs. His modesty was really fascinating to me because all the music videos I’d ever liked were things like U2, with Bono kind of gallivanting around the stage and giving it all that star treatment - - which I think is amazing; U2 were one of my early influences. But to see someone have the same impact just sitting down at an organ and hardly saying a word was just that much more inspiring because I could relate to it more. After Neil Young I went out and got Crosby, Stills and Nash albums, and everybody just kind of wove into each other, I guess. It’s really easy to discover new music by listening to one musician who worked with a lot of others - - you just keep going that way.

You’re really good at taking the qualities that you like from your influences and turning all that into something that’s very much all your own. Purists might say that it’s a bad thing to kind of pick apart and put back together again, so with that here’s a deep, philosophical question: Do you feel it’s an artist’s responsibility to revolutionize their art and did you decide to be a musician with that ideal in mind? Saying, I’m going to kind of start off with what I’ve heard but aim to do something that nobody’s ever heard before...

I think your music inevitably gets more and more original as you go along, but you should never be too conscious at trying to sound different because that sort of thing always just comes out of nowhere. Like you said, it’s a progression, really. The Beatles started off by kind of sounding like a lot of their contemporaries on the really early albums like A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles For Sale, then progressed to something like Sgt. Pepper’s. And it wasn’t that they sat in the studio making Sgt. Pepper’s thinking, “Right now we’re going to make an album which is going to invent a new form of music!” They thought, “Let’s have some fun here and sort of do something new.” There’s still elements of what they were doing before in there as well, so I don’t know...I’m probably rambling. (Laughs)

No, I get it - it’s more important to you to do what you want to do rather than worry bout what everyone else thinks.

Yeah! It’s like soul music. All those artists, if you think of it in straight musical terms, are kind of hard to differentiate, but when you think about way they sing about the same troubles and things, you know what it’s about then.