Quotes from KT Tunstall

It strikes me as very odd for someone to think, 'You know what, if I put on a bikini, I may shift some more records,' but it happens. If people are comfortable with that, fine, but it's not something that would ever cross my mind.

I'm a serial monogamist - I tend to dive in.

The only thing I know about being Asian is that my hair is black and my eyelashes are straight and I have strange eyebrows.

Most of my friends in London are musicians, but the ones in Scotland have proper jobs.

Albums tend to dictate what they need. Every time I have made an album it sort of feels like it is decided for me how that album is going to sound; it is not really a cerebral decision where you sit down and decide that you are going to make an album that sounds like 'this.'

I grew up knowing I could have had a million different lives. It makes your life mysterious and your imagination go wild.

I can play piano, classical flute, guitar, bass and I'm OK on drums.

My maternal grandmother was Cantonese, so I'm a quarter Chinese and half Irish and a quarter Scottish and raised by English parents living in Scotland.

In Scotland, Dad grew courgettes which were the size of my leg. I'd step into the garden and it was like 'The Day of the Triffids.'

If your parents only listen to jazz or folk, you're like one of those trees you see in botanic gardens that have wire frames on them - you grow into that shape, you follow it or you have to break away from it. But I didn't have influences to embrace or kick against - I also had no idea what anything was.

I was a child badminton wizard.

I've always tried to avoid music being direct therapy, and I've always found there's a power when you write something that can have its own interpretation - although I'm not being intentionally evasive.

I've always had a tendency to keep an emergency exit in a song. I can't remember ever writing a song that is completely and thoroughly depressing; there's always been a way out somehow. A sense of hope in song, regardless of the subject matter.

When I tried to get a record deal, only one label wanted me. The rest said 'oh, we've already got a girl with a guitar.' Can you imagine them ever saying that to a guy?

I had a job for a year, working in a high-quality whiskey-and-wine shop.

I'm not really that comfortable, to be honest, singing about my darkest moments.

What I noticed about living by the sea when I moved to London was that it's really bad when you only have lots of other people to compare yourself to. I grew up relating to the land as well as other people.

British music lovers in general are dreadfully concerned about being cool, but I'm quite happy to grab uncool by the horns at any opportunity.

Basically, my mum and dad bought me a CD player for my 14th birthday. They didn't really listen to music at all, but my dad had a couple of tapes that he'd listen to, like Tom Lehrer. My dad was a physicist and Tom Lehrer was like this really weird Harvard class professor, who was really cool because he was also a satirist and pianist.

The topography of L.A. is fascinating.

I lived in L.A. for a year when I was four - my dad was doing a sabbatical at UCLA - so it always remained quite a familiar place.

Criticism only hurts when there's some truth in it.

I'd love to go to Easter Island, Hawaii, Iceland and Antarctica.

But I'm pretty lucky with my voice. When I first started touring I went to see a woman to give me some coaching on how not to lose my voice. And she was just saying really your voice is a muscle so if you're using it all the time you should actually come back from tour with a stronger voice than you left with. And that's really how I find it.