Declan McKenna

“I love hearing about young people doing well and I'm really behind, you know, a wave of young people inspiring the world to change things for good.”

“I've had opportunities to do a couple of really cool things online, but it's not a festival. A really good online performance, people are honing that as a thing, but no way is it the same.”

“Life is constantly political, it's constantly reminding you that it's political.”

“Many times you may feel alone in the world, but the right record pulls you back to realizing that many people have gone through the same thing.”

“I've always written songs. I learned guitar when I was 9 or 10 years old and it sort of developed from there. When I was 13 and got a loop pedal, I started writing a little more and trying to make a musical project of songs.”

“I wouldn't really describe myself directly as, like, a political musician. I think I have an opinion on a lot of things, and I guess I'm someone who wants to share that and wants to make a point about, you know, certain things I think are right and wrong.”

“It's never going to be easy to release a second album.”

“I'd like to be able to make something as good as 'Hunky Dory' or 'Young Americans.'”

“I've been very fortunate to have my music spread widely via the Internet.”

“The first place I ever landed in America was Tampa.”

“I wrote 'Paracetamol' between the ages of 15 and 16. With many of my songs, I have this strange habit of spending months fumbling over song structure ideas before suddenly writing all the lyrics in one day, and that's what happened here.”

“I'm used to feeling isolated from people I want to see, it's been a big part of my life since I was a teenager touring and so on.”

“We really are already seeing the impacts of climate change, of temperatures rising all around the world.”

“I was a happy child a lot of the time and my parents were always wanting to give me and my siblings the freedom to do what we wanted.”

“When I was 9, I got guitar lessons in my school, just classical guitar. I didn't really like it much. Nowadays, I appreciate classical music a lot more than I did then.”

“It's a cliche, but although we're all different, we're also pretty similar. Rather than caring about the problems that affect us alone, maybe we should start caring about the problems that we've created and start reversing them.”

“I wouldn't be in the position I am now without social media. It has put a lot of power into the hands of creators and artists to just do things on their own terms, but I think that this is what is causing an epidemic of anxiety; people just constantly need information.”

“I wanted to write a song that was outright against war, in any form.”

“St Vincent did a self-titled album four records in, so I could do that. I'll call mine St Vincent and I'll talk about St Vincent more in interviews.”

“People think that if you are young, you don't know what is best for you. That's a myth.”