The curious beauty of African music is that it uplifts even as it tells a sad tale. You may be poor, you may have only a ramshackle house, you may have lost your job, but that song gives you hope.

At art school, a teacher said: 'The best paintings are when you get lost in a piece of work and start painting in a stream of consciousness.' I wanted to do music, not art, so started writing lyrics that way. The first song I wrote was called 'Ice Cream and Wafers.' The next was 'Holding Back the Years.'

Making music is like shopping for me. Every song is like a new pair of shoes.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I'm really not worth being called an artist at all.

Music, at its essence, is what gives us memories. And the longer a song has existed in our lives, the more memories we have of it.

Bellyache' is totally fictional. I like writing about things that aren't real. The song is about not trusting anyone and then putting trust in yourself and realizing that you don't know what you are doing, either. Or realizing that things you do with a group of people that you think are cool in the moment are ultimately all on you.