Matt O'Neill, Journalist

“Well, I figured before we went in, ‘If I can’t bloody sing a song I wrote well enough live to put on an album, I don’t deserve to be a musician’."

"You guys are amazing at pop music. I wish our chart was like yours, to be honest. America would hate me for saying that but it’s true. You guys are always a little bit ahead of the curve."

"And that’s why we kind of avoid terms like traditional... with complete respect for those sorts of artists, blues bands can often be quite conservative. Very calm and orderly. We’re a much freer band."

"I know that, if we do make another record, it will only be because we want to. I just don’t think we’ll know if we want to go through that again until the end of this year."

“It sounds like my life was really intense when you cram it all into one or two paragraphs. But, like, being born blind and having an interesting major at college were actually eighteen years apart. I never saw them as connected in my head."

"If you’d told me ten years ago that my band would tour Asia, I wouldn’t have believed you then."

"You know, I never like to analyse our connection with Elton too much. I mean, why does anyone meet anyone in this life? I just don’t like to look at it too closely – because the whole thing has kind of changed my life."

"Any time you hear something like, ‘Oh, Illy’s a fucking faggot,’ ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, because he’s got that fucking song.’ I have forty others that sound nothing like it."

You know, I live in Nashville, so I’m surrounded by amazing musicians. I know I’m not the greatest guitar-player. I’m confident that I’m good at playing rock’n’roll but what I really think I have is a style

“It’s an interesting question. I feel good about the level of female musicians in Australia that are out there enjoying success right now – you know, I love rocky stuff, I love Abbe May and the path she’s taken as a musician – but I’m definitely coming at it from a different angle,”

“Yeah, we’ve definitely had a lot of backlash. At first, I took it really personally... But, then I saw a video of Dave Grohl doing some joke, and somebody was writing him off."

“It all comes back to what is success and what isn’t success, really. If you’re not happy, you should try harder as a musician. If you are, you’ve done it. You’ve won.”