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?

Despite fashioning myself a very unconventional lifestyle with my music, I had ended up in a really conventional situation. I was also guilty of becoming a people-pleaser, which is absolutely exhausting and not a sustainable way of living. It can be so damaging to fall into that trap, especially in close relationships.

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.

The way I feel about how I look changes daily, but as I've got older, I feel more confident.

I lived in L.A. for a year when I was four - my dad was doing a sabbatical at UCLA - so it always remained quite a familiar place.

My first memories of life were Californian.

It's very addictive having a hit.

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.

When you're in the city, all you see is people. It gets more competitive, people become more introverted.

On tour with me, it's like fluffy-bunny land. Everyone loves every-one else.

I'm not image-obsessed.

I've never been a confessional writer.

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.

Let's face it - the electric guitar is way sexier than the acoustic.

It's unacceptable to tour using non-environmentally friendly fuel when there are alternatives.

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 always try to travel as light as possible. I feel really embarrassed having loads of luggage.

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.

I think there is optimism to what I write.

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.

But I'm pretty lucky with my voice. When I first started touring I went to see a woman to give me some coaching on how not to lose my voice. And she was just saying really your voice is a muscle so if you're using it all the time you should actually come back from tour with a stronger voice than you left with. And that's really how I find it.

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've never been one to indulge in out and out depression when it comes to songwriting.

If I can be somewhere with sunshine and have bare feet and a book, I'm happy.

Skiing fast feels like complete freedom to me.

I'd love to go to Easter Island, Hawaii, Iceland and Antarctica.

I've always been a huge fan of Beck.

Most of my friends in London are musicians, but the ones in Scotland have proper jobs.

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.

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.

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.

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 write songs, I play a guitar and that's it.

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.

I'm shocked at how much I can talk about myself.

It's a shame that when you've actually lived some life and have something to write about, they're saying you're too old to come out and play it.

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.

My father had Parkinson's, though he actually died following a bicycle accident.

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 believe that the Universe is like a single organism, and we are all little nerve endings feeding our experiences back into a whole.

I often talk too much and don't listen enough.

I can play piano, classical flute, guitar, bass and I'm OK on drums.

I had a job for a year, working in a high-quality whiskey-and-wine shop.

Criticism only hurts when there's some truth in it.

I've never considered myself a locked-down straight person. I've had relationships with girls.

Basically, my mum and dad bought me a CD player for my 14th birthday. They didn't really listen to music at all, but my dad had a couple of tapes that he'd listen to, like Tom Lehrer. My dad was a physicist and Tom Lehrer was like this really weird Harvard class professor, who was really cool because he was also a satirist and pianist.

Politics for me is when I feel a personal engagement between people: I don't trust politicians.

The only regular exercise I do is playing my shows, which are basically two hours of aerobics.

I've got my roots in Northern Ireland - my biological father's side of the family were from Belfast.