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.

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.

People ask me how I make music. I tell them I just step into it. It's like stepping into a river and joining the flow. Every moment in the river has its song.

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.

I am such a Luddite when it comes to making music. All I can do is write at the piano.

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.'