I was a guitar player first off.

I'm still trying to re-create a Ray Charles concert that I heard when I was fifteen years old, and all my nerve endings were fried and transformed, and electricity shot through me.

My parents were music lovers and collectors. It was around.

My first love was the sound of guitar.

My songwriting and my style became more complex as I listened, learned, borrowed and stole and put my music together.

As far as other instrumentalists, I used to love mellow sax players like Paul Desmond. I love piano.

I think the women - Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu - are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music.

I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.

My earliest influences were things I heard in my household.

I'm not a jazz singer.

I am not a jazz singer. I wouldn't place myself on that footing. I wouldn't even enter that arena.

In the horrors of war, please bring me peace.

You couldn’t leave words lying around where our enemies might find them.

Hope is strong trust in divine power.

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

A thought of #hatred must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of #love.

Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies/ a girder, still itself among the rubbish

Idioms are a big thing in Ireland. They want to fill the time, to show how good they are at talk - it's a talk-off

I dress according to how I feel.

I love a little distortion across the bass; I think it kind of adds something to the sound of the band when the bass is a little overdriven.

An entrepreneur is someone with faith in their ability to make something where there was nothing before.