“It was a rural upbringing by the seaside. A real quiet place surrounded by fields. I had to travel into town for school and stuff like that.”

“I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself.”

“The way I did the first album... the way I wrote 'Church'... was just to trust my instincts with the music and let it kind of do what it does.”

“Either somebody has equal rights, or they don't. And certainly in the Irish constitution, marriage is genderless. There's no mention of a man and a woman.”

“I think marriage is a scary concept. It's a scary concept for anybody. I'm not sure where I sit with that.”

“It was a rural upbringing by the seaside. A real quiet place surrounded by fields. I had to travel into town for school and stuff like that.”

“Someone had an eye on me as I was leaving high school. I had a chance to record demos, but they were kind of wanting to make a pop singer out of me, of the 'X Factor' variety. I didn't feel comfortable with it. I wanted to be a songwriter.”

“It was amazing for me to even perform at the Grammys, but to do so alongside Annie Lennox was a truly incredible honor.”

“The more I come to L.A., the more it's amazing.”

“I love making music, but if you make something that inspires somebody else to make something, without getting too airy-fairy, you've contributed to the zeitgeist in some way, and that's just an amazing feeling.”

“One of my first festivals was Oxygen 2006. It had this amazing lineup with the Arctic Monkeys on their first or second album, the Strokes, Kings of Leon, the Magic Numbers and then the Who and James Brown. I waited in the pit for a good eight hours to see James Brown.”