Michael Smith, Journalist

“In some way, all the stories are connected to a place of fear for me, or a place of longing, or a place that I’m grappling with anyway."

“I was listening a lot to Metallica and after that I listened to Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins – I was really into them. The first song I wrote was kind of Nirvana style."

“I’d like to put it on record that I hate Mumford & Sons!”

"I didn’t necessarily plan on that but I certainly planned on trying to get the right environment. It was quite a challenge but it seemed to work; it’s a bit of a field recording and it seems to have caught people’s imaginations over here, actually.”

"I think it might have been the last record of that chapter… You don’t ever set out to write songs about a particular time or period of your life.”

“For me, most of my songs always come out of live performance. I have a really strange kind of ritual – before I play a gig I sit down and before I know it I’ve written a song. It’s happened so many times it’s weird."

"One of the important steps that made our sound different was the fact of going acoustic, losing the drums, losing the electricity.”

“I really stumbled upon that situation completely by accident. Changing my ukulele strings one day I was missing the third string in that pack, so I just put on the other three strings and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to write a song with the three strings?"

“We’re kind of sort of 30-something year old guys asking ourselves why are we writing music? Why are we at album number four? Sort of looking at ourselves in our worlds and our little societies."

"After Birdman broke up in 2007, I was looking for a new outlet and also going through a difficult time in my life, and that can aid the creative process a little bit, and I had been back to Detroit and visited and started writing, and those were the songs that came out over about a two-year period.”

“I realised at some point that you can’t please everybody, so to hell with them, do what makes you happy, and I’ve been doing that ever since.”

“So it’s about taking a bit of a gamble and I do think it paid off – I’m personally very happy with the songs and I also think they’re quite diverse."