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I think marriage is a scary concept. It's a scary concept for anybody. I'm not sure where I sit with that.
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A lot of the 'leave' campaign was centered around a thinly veiled xenophobia, just 'control our own borders.' It's not a good look. I don't think it represents Britain; I don't think it represents the U.K. all too well. It breaks my heart for my generation in Britain who are going to suffer.
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I had a fascination with the roots of African American music. That would have been my first education in music. I had a real passion for it. I wanted to play it, sing it. I could sing at a young age, but I started to teach myself bass guitar and started writing when I was 15.
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Governments do not care about your Facebook-assembled opinion. Incompetent politicians don't read your tweets; there are reasons for them being out of touch. Change does not come about for 'likes' on a page, though the ideas for it may start there.
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I love Muddy Waters and Nina Simone. I also watched 'The Blues Brothers' movie over and over.
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Things were never as exciting for me as the first gig in New York.
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If you can say something beautiful in a very terrible way - I was always drawn to that.
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I look at all good things with a bit of a dark lens, I suppose, especially with something like love.
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I found the experience of falling in love or being in love was a death: a death of everything. You kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way, and you experience for the briefest moment - if you see yourself for a moment through their eyes - everything you believed about yourself gone. In a death-and-rebirth sense.
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Social media is an advertisement for the superficial extroverted self.
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I would love to get in trouble with the Catholic Church. I'm not religious myself, but my issue is with the organization. It's an organization of men - it's not about faith.
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You grow up and recognize that in any educated secular society, there's no excuse for ignorance. You have to recognize in yourself, and challenge yourself, that if you see racism or homophobia or misogyny in a secular society, as a member of that society, you should challenge it. You owe it to the betterment of society.
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Growing up, I always saw the hypocrisy of the Catholic church. The history speaks for itself, and I grew incredibly frustrated and angry. I essentially just put that into my words.
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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.
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There is no singer I can think of who can touch Ella Fitzgerald. And when Billie Holiday sings, she's merciless about it. Her voice has just this immaculate sadness - even in happy songs, there was something that was so broken about it.
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I have a bit of a love affair with fairy tales and some of the ideas of Irish mythology, like Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, who captured a lot of that very beautifully.
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I just hate getting my hair cut.
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I tried to avoid anything that caused me frustration or grief or duress. I played FarmVille and procrastinated like all teenagers.
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It was amazing for me to even perform at the Grammys, but to do so alongside Annie Lennox was a truly incredible honor.
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The public discourse online is not done through the polite language of debate.
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I'm an awful control freak at times when it comes to production and stuff like that.
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I'm uncomfortable with selfies and status updates documenting mundane pieces of my life, which I don't think should be of interest to anyone else.
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I was essentially raised on blues music. My dad was a blues musician around Dublin when I was a baby, so the only music I would listen to growing up was John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. It's music that feels like home to me.
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Religion wasn't imposed on me.