With his intimate Raw Files tour now wrapped up, Kim Churchill is reflecting about a life spent on the road, zig-zagging across the globe between heaving festival stages and tiny venues. "The festivals are full of adrenaline and excitement and extreme socialising and really wild, high energy, high vibrational crazy times, and that's me as well. If there was too much of either I'd kind of lose balance," he muses.

Exploding onto the scene in his late teens after years of busking, it's been a whirlwind trip that often takes him away from the moments of peace that are paramount for both writing and balance. "It was quite hard and sad to begin with, and then I kind of forced myself to stop and lock myself to a beach shack in Sri Lanka for a month and just surf until I couldn't walk. But that wasn't really nourishing either, it almost had a slight resistance to it, like I was doing so much to kind of get back at myself for having no time on tour," he laments.

Churchill speaks openly about his life on the road, his anecdotes filled with the same impassioned, full-bodied imagery of his lyricism. You hear the waves in Sri Lanka; taste the 2am red wine in Quebec; feel the biting cold on a New York morning. "I'll never forget the time I was in Mexico and I was hell-bent on this tradition that I had of muesli and yoghurt and fruit. So I was getting the shittiest cereal and the shittiest yoghurt - the cheapest, nastiest stuff - and chopping up apples and trying to find bananas. But then someone took me out for breakfast one day to this tiny little beach shack restaurant and I had the most incredible food, and I'm thinking 'What the hell am I doing?' you know? Clinging to this idea that yoghurt and muesli in the morning makes me happy."

With his new album Weight Falls on the horizon, he's looking forward to unveiling his new band format at The Gum Ball Music Festival. "Everyone that’s tried to take the step from a one-man-show into a band scenario has inevitably lost something intrinsic... I wanted to make sure I wasn’t sucking any of that out in the new set-up," he says decidedly.

Churchill is humorously critical of his younger self in comparison to his current direction. "When I began... I was very keen on showing everyone how good a guitarist I was. Very high energy and fast and, for want of a better term, a lot of cheap tricks. [In the studio] I’d go in and bash on things and strum my heart out, have all this energy, then listen back and go ‘Urgh, it’s kinda painful!’ The maturing - I've just moved away from wanting to shock and impress people for all of 30 seconds to wanting to move and inspire and guide them for the rest of their lives with the song."

But one thing has remained from that time - "I was doing a lot of flamenco strumming, hot sweaty gigs, and I couldn't afford for the thumb pick to come off, so I gaffed it on!" he laughs. "And I've just done it ever since!"