You were signed to Polydor for your first project, which was commercially and critically successful. Do you think making money as an artist was more straightforward and feasible at that time, because it was before streaming?
No. That’s always been a problem. The difference is touring was easier and cheaper then. I was [25]. I was thinking about what I was doing next week. I wasn’t thinking, “How am I ever going to be able to have a house?” That just changes as you get older. To be frank with you, my Universal [Polydor] deal is still unrecouped. I owe them money. I don’t have a spare 20 grand to audit them, but I’ve never been paid for that record and I’ll never own it.
Do you still have a close relationship with that music from 2012?
When the record was released in 2012, I was pretty unaware of what was happening. I didn’t know that [my album] was super successful. I didn’t know that lots of people loved it. I didn’t understand that that was a possibility. I should have pushed on faster and harder at that time, but I found the whole thing so overwhelming, weird and discombobulating that I stepped back. I always felt like people came to my shows by mistake. I don’t think it’s imposter syndrome. I think it’s something else: not knowing how to accept the love. It’s taken me a long time to look back at that and be like, “Oh, people really connected with it. People really enjoyed it. It was a little moment.”
You moved from the U.K. to Los Angeles after finding that early success. Why?
I was in L.A. a lot in 2014 and 2013, and I loved it. I found it romantic, mysterious and cheap, believe it or not. There’s a cliché about L.A. that it’s socially alienating, that it takes people a long time to find their people. In my book that’s a good thing. Artists can disappear into their own world there. It’s great if you have the discipline. I loved it.
