When I was growing up, I despised Irishness. I felt our music, our television and our books were just poor imitations of what came out of Britain and America. I was all set to abandon it entirely.

Or maybe memories are like karaoke - where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't even know the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning - and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better not to know the lyrics to your life.

We definitely weren't poor growing up, but we weren't rich.

My parents listened to music in our house all the time when we were growing up. It was everything from Dolly Parton to Paul Simon... We packed in everything.

I was a fan of T-Pain's music growing up. I bought 'Epiphany' and 'Rappa Ternt Sanga.'

Growing up in Houston, the music scene is super boring.