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A youthful American voice isn't particularly challenging - I've been a young American, and they're all around me. I can walk from my house to Barrington High School.

I'm very aware when I'm speaking to the English of how flat my Mid-Atlantic American voice is.

I had a dialect coach to get an American accent, and then another dialect coach to come off it a bit. There is something deep and mysterious in the voice when it isn't too high-pitched American.

When I arrived in L.A., I assumed I'd be able to put on the American accent. It proved difficult, so I had six months working with a dialect coach, and it's become a habit.

I grew up in the suburbs north of Atlanta. I had an amazing childhood, and I still go back to my home in Atlanta often.

I've always felt, even as a songwriter, that the rhythm of speech is in itself a language for me.

I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.

Voices are like fingerprints, from Cagney to Bogart. They never lost it. My voice is instrumental in categorizing me.

There's something really powerful when I, for example, hear Bob Marley's 'Exodus' - we know where we're going. We know where we're from.

I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.