"What I've picked up from working with the women in the Gori choir is that they don't have egos. All that matters is the music."
"And I did feel there was an album to be made about winter that can make you feel the way Sinatra and Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline make me feel - warm, nostalgic and comforted."
"I'm enjoying doing research, to get better at the guitar, to get better at rhyming. That's an essential skill."
"At 15, I did a ouija board with my best friend. I pretended I was possessed by a ghost, and she believed it."
"I am not saying everything's perfect, but I embrace anything bad because that makes me appreciate all the good."
"After 'Nine Million Bicycles', I was sent bikes from all over the world. I got about 10."
"I've always been very open and unspecific about what kind of music I want to make."
"The first dramatic experience I had of music was when I was five. The electricity had gone out in Georgia, and my mum played the 'Moonlight Sonata' on the piano."
"I did go through a phase of reading a lot of poetry and getting heavily into philosophy and ended up writing things that weren't really in a musical format, which I put to some very electronic-based backing."
"Because of things like 'The X Factor' and 'Autotune', the real art of communicating a song is not treasured any more. But singing other people's songs can be an intensely personal experience. I want the songs to be vessels that people fill with their own imagination, the same way that I fill it with my thoughts and feelings."
"I love winter. It's a beautiful time, but also a melancholic time, a reflective time, and I'd come to a point in my life where I felt I had to make certain decisions about my career."
"Ever since I left the Brit school I've been so protected. I had a woman to do my hair and makeup every day throughout my 20s."
"Granddad was deported to a Siberian prison camp at the age of 15."
"When the lights did come on in Georgia and the electricity did come on - you know, 'cause they did for about one hour during the day - we would watch Hollywood films and we'd listen to music from America and the West."
"And I've teamed up with a choir from home. They're called the Gori Women's Choir. They're a 23-piece all-female choir, and they've been going since the '70s."
"Well, I couldn't speak English before I went to Belfast. So I learned English with a Northern Irish accent."
"I mean Georgia, and also Belfast, aren't the most stable places, politically, in the world. But the thing is, in both places, the people were just so kind and so warm and in Belfast so welcoming."
"I started writing and recording, at a very basic level, just in my own bedroom."
"But I do think I'm quite a selfish performer in the sense that I'm not one of those that's like 'Hey, come on everybody lets sing along' you know that kind of thing."
"I used to watch 'Aliens', and I just found Sigourney Weaver's character so empowering."
"When the Soviet Union broke down, Georgia suffered a huge deal. Pretty much the whole of the 90's was known as 'the black decade... because we had a lot of electricity blackouts."
"I grew up in Georgia where my parents, little brother Zurab and I shared a flat with my paternal grandparents and two uncles in the capital, Tbilisi. Times were hard and the country was racked by civil war."
"My father longed for a better life for us, and when I was nine he got a job as a heart surgeon in Belfast. It was very bittersweet when we said goodbye to our relatives, and I remember crying my eyes out at the airport."
"My father has been an inspiration - he instilled his work ethic without ever having to hammer it home. He was also very encouraging."
"My mother is caring and selfless, and really looks after me. When I'm touring, she still picks me up from the airport, no matter what time it is."
