"Ever since I’d been aware of Mr Meat I’d not been a fan at all. I thought he was bombastic, loud, churlish, arrogant – there was nothing about him that appealed to me, including his overtly showbizzy operatic voice. I’d never been a fan, until I was desperate for a track for some radio show I was doing where I needed to find an example of storytelling. I was looking for examples of people who told authentic observational tales, and I was stuck. Then my wife called to me from the other side of the office saying, ""life is a lemon and I want my money back”. I said I was terribly sorry to hear this, and she said, “no, the Meat Loaf song, ‘Life Is A Lemon (And I Want My Money Back)’,” although Jim Steinman actually wrote the song. So I found the song and became, if not a Meat Loaf addict, at least someone who had established a degree of reverence for both Meat Loaf at his best and the lyrical and musical writing of Jim Steinman. I think it’s a great song, and it just happens to be on this album. I’m not saying I enjoy the whole album or most of Meat Loaf’s work, but that is a very good track. As soon as I heard it I told my wife, “damn, I wish I’d written that,” which is probably the biggest compliment anyone in my position can pay to somebody else. In fact, I think that should be the epitaph on my gravestone."

"With some of the other songs here I said ‘I wish I’d written that song’, but I did write this one. I figured I had to at least put in one song I wrote, so if nothing else it’s a guilty pleasure. “‘Even Though Our Love Is Doomed’ had a long birth on Strange Little Birds and it’s an important song to me. I came up with the title when I was driving. I called Shirley and said ‘I have this title’ and she loved it. I said I’d work on it but all I had was the idea for the chorus and for the longest time it just sat around. I made all these different demos of it, an alternative-rock one, a clubby techno one, another sounded kind of hip-hop and a folk version and I hated all of them. Shirley asked what happened to it and I told her I hadn’t found anything that fitted what I’d heard in my head, so she said I should just bring in a simple demo to hear. I got home that night and panicked, because all I had was the chorus, I figured I had to put an arrangement together, even if it was just a temporary holding pattern. I picked up a bass and played the riff at the start and for some reason I wrote all the lyrics, they just came out in five minutes. The lyrics work on a bunch of levels. It refers to our band, the things that we have to work through, trying to survive and understand what’s going on, and it works for me in terms of my personal relationships with people where there’s been difficult times. That’s really what the song is about, trying to realise that it’s worth fighting through difficult times if something’s worth holding on to. It’s a really personal song to me. I liked the sonic template of it and that was a big inspiration for Strange Little Birds. We wanted to make more of a cinematic, atmospheric sounding record and less of a rock record. I liked the way the sound of the music and Shirley’s voice worked together. The song is important to me in that sense and the lyrics mean a lot to me, they’re about people I know, our band and myself."