Quote

My Dublin wasn't the Dublin of sing-songs, traditional music, sense of history and place and community.

I know so many Irish musicians. They're all over, because there has been so much emigration from Ireland. Like the Jews.

I'd love to live in Ireland but I'd like to live as me, not what someone thinks I am. People don't understand - I lived there before I was famous.

It used to be the case that for an Irishman to come to the U.S. involved a perilous journey on a ship. It involved singing lots of songs before you left saying goodbye, and once you were in the U.S., it involved singing lots of songs about how you were never going to set foot in Ireland again.

I always gravitate towards anything from Ireland. With Irish lit, I love the use of language, but also in many instances, the Irish writers are writing about people and circumstances that I can relate to.

You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

Ireland is such an amazing country, and I have this little dream in the back of my head that someday I'll end up living there. When I've established myself in America and I don't need to live near the action, so to speak, and if you're good, the work will come to you. I feel very Irish; maybe that's why I've been so lucky with my career.

I had grown up as an Irish poet in a country where the distance between vision and imagination was not quite as wide as in some other countries.

I was brought up in the countryside in Ireland and would go bonkers if I couldn't escape the city. I like to wake and hear birds tweeting, not the low drone of traffic.

I sure love Ireland. The first trip I ever made was last year when I did this record in Dublin.