"I heard this on the radio in the States, and I loved the songwriting. He was coming up with something different, it was a soulful folk, so I went and bought the album in LA, I thought “I gotta hear what this guy does” and every bloody track on it is a gem. I’ve always loved the sound of an album, maybe as much as the songs themselves, you know the performance, the sound of it makes a big difference to me. And now you know you can get box sets with alternate takes, and you realise then how long it took them sometimes to get the final take. The first time they did it was good, but then all of a sudden - boom - and there it is. I think there’s a good learning process to listen to the ones they didn’t let go, where the producers said “not yet”, and they persevered until... there it is. When I’ve been in a club sometimes, I’ve gotten up [on stage] and they’ve been like, “Do ‘Delilah’!”, and I’ve said “Let me just do this, which I don’t normally do"". So it is, because when you’ve made big records - great onstage, the way you do your own show - but it’s great to do other stuff when you don’t have to do those things. Not that I don’t like them, you know ‘Delilah’’s a great record, but its nice to do other things. So when you hear someone like Bill Withers doing something like that and being successful, you think, “See, there’s room for that.” There’s room for all different kinds of records. They don’t all have to be the same, or in the same vein, or chasing some things just to get a hit record."

"I heard it when I was 17 or 18 and it really changed my view of what music could be in that there’s so much beauty in Jeff Buckley’s voice. Also, the guitar on that record is the biggest guitar influence that I’ve ever had. Jeff Buckley uses his voice in this very free way and it can go wherever he wants it to: that’s something that I've intentionally and subconsciously very much taken on myself as a singer. His voice can be so subtle, quiet and soft and then it becomes this roaring kind of force and, again, that’s something that completely inspired me as a singer. He’s very much about that play between his voice and his guitar but they both feel like they’re partners and the essence of who he is—I feel inspired by that as a musician myself. I always try and have a play between the guitar and the voice, to make them speak the same language and tell the story of myself. I remember writing Jeff Buckley lyrics all over my bag I took to college. I like the way you would take on lyrics and feel that they were expressing a part of you, so you'd always feel proud to have them on your schoolbag as if you wrote them yourself. That’s a really cute thing about being a teenager and looking a very particular way. Teenagers react to music because they’re always looking for a way to identify themselves."