"I’d always quite liked Leonard Cohen, but when he died we’d just started making this record and that sent me into a deep Cohen shaped hole. It also came at a time where I felt quite lost as a songwriter and we were still trying to figure out what we wanted to do with this record. “That was about eighteen months ago and he really helped me to rediscover my voice I think. He reminded me how important it is to be yourself - to be cynical, to be dark, to try and be sexy, to put all of yourself into what you do, to be idiosyncratic, unique and personal in your approach to songwriting. I was in the midst of trying to write about quite universal themes and attempt to be as universal as possible and I think I maybe lost my way a bit, but he helped me to rediscover things. “He’s just so clever as well. If you’ve got a broken heart the second verse in ‘Take This Waltz’ is so good, I love how he can take a really simple sentence, switch out one word and completely flip the meaning; “There's a concert hall in Vienna where your mouth had a thousand reviews”, that’s so evocative and he does that all the time. For this record it got me into the habit of writing entire songs before the music, I’d write an entire lyric before I had any melody, which is actually what I used to do when I was eighteen. Then I could try and focus on trying to be funny, cynical and as honest and personal as possible. “I guess it’s like the difference between a book and a film isn’t it? People often ask me why I don’t like poetry or read it and it’s because I find it really hard to bring it to life, I’d much rather listen. A lot of my friends say ‘you’re so obsessed with lyrics, why aren’t you interested in poetry?’ but for me they don’t really come to life off the page. Leonard Cohen is a poet, but its poetry set to music and he brings it to life. For me, he’s more relatable and easier to connect with than Bob Dylan, you know what he’s talking about, but he does it in a very clever way. “I chose this song because I had a broken heart when he died. I was almost listening to it as poetry more than a song and actually it’s not my favourite song of his, but in the second and third verses, he talks about people being sentenced to death by the blues and it’s really evocative. I’m sure I wrote ‘Young American’ because of him, that was the first song I wrote for the record and that was lyrics first and then put to music, because of verses like that. I was trying to be naked in my approach to lyrics"