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I came along and was a teenager in the Depression, and nobody had jobs. So I went out hitchhiking, when I met a man named Woody Guthrie. He was the single biggest part of my education.

My grandfather was a massive influence in my music. Growing up, he would play a lot of old-school records to me. A lot of jazz and swing music, actually, growing up.

Music had been my first love among the arts, and I was fascinated by it, as I still am.

I'm a hybrid-genre person, which a lot of people find confusing. I grew up listening to American country music and rock n' roll made between 1955 and 1959. The Everly Brothers and Chuck Berry were my first musical loves and are still what I am most moved by. Roy Orbison came a little bit later.

Music was always part of my life - my mother says I came out singing. I wanted to be Gene Kelly - or Judy Garland.

Originally I studied as a musician, a classical pianist. That was my career before I took up acting in my late 20s.

I loved a lot of different kinds of music, but for my own thing, I went for the singer-songwriters.

I had a very thorough grounding in music; I'd grown up around songs. My parents listened to a lot of music. My dad was majorly into jazz, which was absolutely a big influence on me, even if it was more subconsciously as a kid.

From early on there were two things that filled my life - music and storytelling, both of them provoked by my father. He was a jazz pianist and also a very good storyteller, an avid reader. He passed both those interests on to me.