"Terms of Endearment is always a touchstone movie for me. That’s one of the best acted comedy-dramas that has ever been made. I can never get enough of Terms of Endearment. I find myself watching it over and over again. It does everything that I want a movie to do. I fall in love with the characters. I care about their journeys. It never does anything easy to make me like the characters. It doesn’t sell out the characters for likeability. They all do things that are awful to each other. The relationships are very complicated. Yet, you root for all of them when you watch the movie. A large portion of the movie is also about cancer. It’s treated realistically and it is also hilarious in some of those moments. It’s not a maudlin movie. There are moments in that movie that I think about all the time that haunt me. The moment when Shirley MacLaine is yelling at the nurse to give her daughter more medicine… As you get older, you find yourself in those situations. It may be my favorite film of all time."

"I had to chop out Songs Of Love & Hate by Leonard Cohen, but I've got a later man-and-acoustic-guitar record that I think I like a little more. What I've got in now is October Language by Belong. The first Belong album is just synthesised guitar noise but incredibly serene and beautiful. It's a pretty unique record. The only record that I could compare it to through personal experience is Endless Summer by Fennesz, the so-distorted-that-it-starts-to-confuse-you guitar noise. It's just a wonderful record. It's a great record to listen to while travelling. I think that's the best circumstance to listen to music in. Where did I discover it? Probably record shopping. I'm really good friends with the guys who work in Monorail, and they have quite a good gist of what music I like, so there's a good chance I went in and they threw it at me and said 'this has got you written all over it'."

"I really love heavy metal. I’m very open, so I don’t really care about genres and often with heavy metal I just like it. I was a huge fan of many heavy metal bands when I was a kid, the first concert I went to was Gojira and then Mastodon and then Slayer. I was eleven and I really loved it. “None of my friends liked the music and so I remember feeling at home at the shows, because I met people who understood it. It’s so angry without being hostile if you really listen to it, but it can sound hostile to people who don’t understand it. “This is quite a calm song by Mastodon. It’s a childhood memory, but a song that allowed me to discover Mastodon with a more melodic song than most heavy metal bands I knew. I saw them play two times actually. “I try and turn what I love about heavy metal into something that more people can understand, like in songs like “Under The Water” and “The Seed”, the single I just released, is more heavy. I like the weight"

"I think I was about 12 or 13 when I first heard Miseducation. A sense of identity was such a big thing I was looking for growing up, because of being the only black girl in my year, my family being this mixed-race family in the middle of Scotland. I did really love growing up there – it gave me a lot of peace growing up in the countryside – but at the same time, part of my identity as a black woman was realised when I heard that album. ""I learnt so much about being a black woman from Lauryn Hill and through her music: who I was, why my hair was like this, how to deal with it. I’ve grown with the album, and even now, when I listen to it – I think I’m older than she was when she wrote it – I feel like there’s all those lessons to be learnt. ""The biggest lesson I learnt from Lauryn Hill as a musician is that you don’t always have to be going extra with your voice! Prior to her I’d listened to all the divas: Aretha, and Whitney, and Mariah. I thought the whole goal of being a singer was to go as high and as loud as possible! Listening to Lauryn, I really learnt about how the tone of your voice can be just as powerful as any tricks you can do with it. ""When I heard 'Tell Him', the track was so stripped. It’s just a live drum loop and her voice on topic, with maybe two backing vocals. They’re doing such beautiful harmonies – I think it was a really big lesson in simplicity and bringing out the soul of who you are through your voice without having to do anything fancy. ""The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was just so raw. I love how she mixed in spirituality with her cultural perceptions and with romance. She showed that you don’t have to take one topic – it was a really full-bodied expression from a woman. I just love that album, and that song is my favourite. ""As a singer and a musician growing up, there’ve been a lot of powerful women that have really led my journey. I also really love hip-hop, I love lyric, so anywhere I can find intelligent lyricism I love. There’s something about a woman’s voice telling an honest story that can really catch my ears. I think I’ve inherited that from my Dad, because he was so in love with the divas and these voices and passed his love down on to me. Strong, independent, and quite outspoken through their music – those are the type of women that would inspire me"