I like getting older. I always looked younger than I was, and I found that people wouldn't give me the room to speak. The older I get, it's like, 'Oh, I'm still talking, and they're still listening.'

Diane Cluck is part of the anti-folk movement in New York. She's got a really haunting voice, and she usually sings in the pentatonic scale.

Certain films should only be watched at 40,000 feet. Like, certain comedies and certain, uh, emotionally charged movies.

I played trumpet for Noah and the Whale a couple of times.

Westminster politics is very unattractive, and people are channelling political energy into more inward questioning - there are a lot of musicians whose songs are all about feeling, and it's almost like that's the only safe place to express yourself.

I think the truest things come from silence, but everything's always so clogged up with noise. If everything falls away, and you can truly listen to someone, giving them yourself and generosity, you can truly lose yourself in what they're saying. Like, not impose your ideas on what they're saying, but really tune into them.

I sometimes self-edit when it comes to auditions and go, 'They're not going to cast me, so I'm not going to do it.'

All the adults in my family were actors, so there wasn't much else in terms of role models. I fell in love with that world, being backstage at the theatre.

When I first moved to London, there was talk of a folk revival, with annoying names like nu-folk that made me feel slightly ill.

I try and stay in my right brain as much as I can, but my left takes over.

If you're in a garage band, it's about being better than the band in the next-door garage. But in the folk tradition, it's more a vibe of sharing.

Taking someone else's language and fitting it into your own speech - you learn a lot about other people's brains, doing that.

The Band mean a lot to me in terms of what I aspire to achieve with my group, as the music they made went against the fashion of the time.

What's quite nice about this whole folk movement is that it's born out of genuine friendship. And nobody's infringing on anybody's space.

Music always gets bumped until I have some time to get around to it.

I've always identified as an actor. That's what I set out to do.

I like really bad puns - proper, red-top, nasty puns - I find them funny.

I fell in love with the legend of Paul Robeson as a kid. My dad would tell me all these amazing stories about his life and, bizarrely, ended up singing to Robeson on his deathbed.

I find it hugely exciting to be dealing with another writer's language.

I'm a big Bob Dylan fan. I'm also a blues geek.

It's interesting to marry American musical traditions with the subtlety of English-style storytelling and folk singer-songwriters like Martin Carthy and Bert Jansch - they're two heritages that are distinct but also cross over on so many levels.

My guitar is a 1934 National Trojan. They call it a resonator, which is the guitar guys played in the honky-tonks before amplification. It's very loud. It's the type of guitar that Son House and Robert Johnson played.

My only incentive is to write music that changes me, where the process of making it is a discovery and is true in some way, at that moment.

I have a classical music background. I studied violin and trumpet.