Passenger

“I have spent a lot of time out in Australia, and so I have a good little fan base out there.”

“I can play the main stage at the Newport Folk Festival in front of 10,000 people and do all the gigs and stuff I want to do. Then I can go home and get toilet paper on a Sunday morning and not get hassled.”

“I still have the mentality of a street musician, because I was one for five years. Every opportunity that comes my way, I feel like, 'Absolutely, let's do this.' Sometimes, it's to my detriment. But I don't think you become successful by not saying yes to opportunities.”

“What I love is when I play gigs, it's just me and a guitar - very simple, very direct and intimate, and you hear every lyric, and you hear every detail.”

“I learned classical guitar as a kid at about 7 or 8 years old. When I was about 14, I started dabbling in songwriting. That's when I got into the folky singer-songwriter style.”

“I'm so lucky to not have to busk anymore, but I realized as soon as I didn't need to do it that I really missed it.”

“I spent my life on the road touring, and a lot of the songs are written in tour buses and hotel rooms.”

“Busking is the essence of what I do. It's made everything possible.”

“I think we're all survivors, to be honest. I mean, some of us more than others - some of us have to survive far more horrendous things than others. It's all relative: whatever your experience is.”

“You have to play to your strengths, and my strength is the amount of content I create.”

“Busking taught me so much on so many levels, not just about being a musician or writing songs - actually about growing up and being a human!”

“Ed Sheeran is a good mate of mine, and he just flies around the place doing every single bit of promo or gig or interview, and it's no wonder that when you combine that with immense talent that he's playing in stadiums and arenas around the world.”

“I write wherever I am. It helps that the writing process, for me, is a lone-wolf mission.”

“When I sat down with all the songs before recording, I realised I'd written a few songs specifically about places in America - there was this song about Detroit and another about Yellowstone National Park. My dad is actually American, so I wrote another song about that side of my family.”

“For me, it's always just about playing the song and recording it and giving it what it needs as a song.”

“I write so much and I release so much music that I think I'm less precious about that stuff than a lot of people.”

“I can headline a festival and then literally, 10 minutes later, be walking around, and nobody notices.”

“If you go back to early folk, it's all storytelling; that's exactly what it is: some guy telling a story in a pub to 50 people with a guitar, you know.”

“I think whenever I've thought something might go well, it hasn't, and when I've thought, 'Oh yeah, just chuck it out there,' that's when it kicks off, so now, I don't claim to understand anything.”

“My dad's from New Jersey, so I used to go to America a lot. I feel like it is a second home.”