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You get one chance to make an impression, and coasting through is a disservice.
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I like working by myself.
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I like what I like, I don't like what I don't like, and I'm very bad at toning myself down.
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You just wake up and make music.
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I'm very ambitious, musically - I want to create great things, not mediocre work.
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I don't know if I'm attention deficit, but I certainly am easily distracted by other things.
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I've traveled quite a lot and become a coffee nut.
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You can batter your guitar, and it won't distort too much, which is important for me because I play with my hands a lot - I don't really play with picks.
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I think it's safe to say that if you talk to anybody in Ireland, they'll have a passing knowledge of the guitar. It was something that I couldn't get away from when I was younger: guitars played in shops and parties, just everywhere.
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It's like half the campaign of selling a record is trying to convince people that you're an artist. Well, I am an artist. This is what I do.
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I'm mostly a keep-to-myself kind of guy, but you slowly find yourself getting folded into the musical tapestry.
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When I first saw Drake, I thought I was never going to like him based on the person that I saw on T.V. He's just so full on, and he's got the ladies' man thing, which isn't necessarily something that would resonate with me.
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I've got an Avalon guitar - that's the company that used to be Lowden. They come out of Ireland, and they're like these folk kind of guitars. You can pick 'em, you can strum 'em - they're quite good.
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I didn't start playing music really until I was 18/19, so it was a relatively new thing. I didn't play much music in school.
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I was never a 'sit down with a notepad and write lyrics' kind of person.
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More often than not, changes had to be made in order for a song to make sense, and by the end of it, it would just be something different. Lyrically, I am usually fairly confused until something is finished, and then it makes perfect sense to me.
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I heard of this Texas studio. The owner, Tony Rancich, wanted to fly us out for the day to see the studio. I booked it the next day. He's that rare guy that is in it purely for the love of it.
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I remember always looking forward to listening to country music in the car with my mother, and it wasn't even something I enjoyed in the sense of music, but just being around music itself was enough.
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With music, it feels natural that, in my head, I can pull things apart and then put them back together very quickly.
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The only thing that's ever made sense to me has been sitting in the house by myself making music.
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I moved to London with this really warped sense of expectation.
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The idea of trying to predict what people will or won't respond to is risky.
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My mum was a big fan of E.L.O. and Elvis Costello. She used to play that, consistently, all the time when we were kids. And my dad, he would claim to be a singer... You know, he loves singing, and he used to sing a lot when he was a kid and at parties and stuff like that. So I come from a very party-musical family.
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It bothers me when musicians listen to music from the '60s and try and recreate it. Those people weren't trying to recreate music from the '20s. Why do it?