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When my friends started to care about getting girlfriends, I really didn't. I started to think, literally, 'What's wrong with me?' and, 'Why can't I be normal like everybody else?'
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I've been a huge fan of Adele, Sam Smith, and Ed Sheeran, and those amazing artists draw inspiration from their present and past experiences; they write songs from their heart.
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As one of the dumb, voiceless ones I speak. One of the millions of immigrants beating, beating out their hearts at your gates for a breath of understanding.
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I was suppressed for many years. From the outside, you'd think I had a very normal life.
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I met a guy, and we were seeing each other for about a month or so, but as it got more intense, I started to freak out a little bit. I hadn't been in a relationship for quite a while, and I just said I was going away and not sure if it was going to work.
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My mates who are younger than me are all slagging me for it - saying I am so much older and my crow's feet are showing.
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I'd always been a little bit uncomfortable talking about my sexuality just because it took me a while to fully accept it. I had a bit of traumatic time with my friends when I was younger, and it kind of just put me off talking about it.
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The power that makes grass grow, fruit ripen, and guides the bird in flight is in us all.
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I want to reach out to everybody with my music and my album, but you're never going to please everybody. Someone's going to say something because, you know, it's an opinionated industry.
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I'm one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in.
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In America, money takes the place of God.
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I'm single, which is good because I can concentrate the hell out of my performances. At some point, I'm going to want to find someone to chill out with at the end of the night and talk about things.
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The only compensation for the artist is the chance to feed hungry hearts.
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When somebody says, 'I don't like your cover'... that's fair enough, but then this person has just written to me and said that they've come out to their family because of my interpretation. So I've got to balance everything. And yeah... that warms my heart.
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'If Our Love Is Wrong' is, quite simply, my coming out song, as I was trying to wrap my head around my sexuality and was starting to learn about songwriting, and that my honesty and my authenticity came from my personal experiences and writing about stuff that genuinely bugged me or upset me.
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I have worked with a lot of people, all very different creatives, helping me hone my craft and discover myself as an artist and the record I want to make. It's such an amazing process seeing and hearing the tracks that people could eventually be listening to on my debut album!
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I remember when we were going to release 'Dancing On My Own,' and I went into the record label crying to them that I was terrified people wouldn't support me anymore if they knew I was gay.
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To be in the charts and hanging around with such huge names in the industry just feels like a complete privilege! I can't even explain how it feels - complete dream come true.
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I'm very keen on making the world a better place, whether that's changing people's attitudes or giving people the confidence to be who they are.
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I'm kind of unlucky in love and I have, for some reason, always fallen for the straight guy.
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The amount of people that have said, 'You've inspired me to be confident. I've come out to my friends because of you,' that reduces me to tears every time, because I'm just, like, little old me from Hull has had an implication on somebody's life. That's massive to me. Massive.
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I just wanted to sing, to get my voice heard. I knew I had to do everything possible to stay in the industry.
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I come from a very normal day job, a very normal upbringing, so I had six or seven years working in an office nine to five in human resources. I had the normal life and kind of thought maybe this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life but still had that passion and that yearning for music.
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I feel very privileged to do what I do, so I'm just going to keep working hard and enjoy every minute of it because it could be over just like that.