I started growing my audience in small clubs through word-of-mouth. I started making music that isn't necessarily commercially viable, and it's not necessarily marketable to my peers to a certain extent.
Growing up, my imagined life as a musician was something along the lines of me lounging in a Learjet en route to a swelling outdoor amphitheatre on a dazzling summer's eve.
Very often, writing a song is a process that happens to me rather than one that I instigate. I feel a song coming on and, like a sneeze; I wait for it until it comes.
I would spend hours absorbing every intonation, every inflection - how the singer would convey a sentiment and how it would sound coming out of their head. All of those things I very carefully watched and absorbed, and so I guess I was studying my whole life, although not in any sort of conventional way.
