Top 33 Passenger Quotes

I try and put myself in other peoples eyes, as I dont feel I’ve got anything new to say about myself at 23.

If you can write a catchy melody and a song that captures people around the world, what better thing to do? Other than ‘Let Her Go,’ I haven’t managed to do that. And that’s fine by me.

All I really want is for people to really get what I do and connect with the songs and find meaning in them.

I can headline a festival and then literally, 10 minutes later, be walking around, and nobody notices.

I think, after ‘Let Her Go,’ I wanted to show people that I don’t just write really sad love songs about my ex-girlfriend: that there’s another side to Passenger as well that’s a bit more up-tempo and more inclined to social commentary.

I spent my life on the road touring, and a lot of the songs are written in tour buses and hotel rooms.

Busking taught me so much on so many levels, not just about being a musician or writing songs – actually about growing up and being a human!

If you’re a priority artist, then you get an amazing amount of exposure and money thrown. If you are more niche, then it’s not necessarily the way forward. If you want Instagram followers and fame, then the major labels are still really great for that.

I can find myself in a situation where, by the time I’m releasing an album, I have the next one written. It is a bit old school.

I write so much and I release so much music that I think I’m less precious about that stuff than a lot of people.

I think Passenger is a bit of an ambiguous thing because in the past, it’s been a band, or it’s been just me, or a duo or whatever, but I kind of like that as well. I think it’s whatever that I’m doing with whoever I’m doing it with!

Some people expect me to have changed overnight because of one big song.

I’m very much of that old-school mentality of believing that if it works with an acoustic guitar and a vocal, then it should work within any format – and especially when most of my live work is just guitar and vocals, so it really does have to work with only that.

I can play the main stage at the Newport Folk Festival in front of 10,000 people and do all the gigs and stuff I want to do. Then I can go home and get toilet paper on a Sunday morning and not get hassled.

I think some sing-songwriter music can just be very serious – after an hour and a half of it, you are exhausted – so I try and give it light and shade.

I love that – you get everything from seven-year-olds to 87-year-olds at Passenger gigs.

Some songs take months to get right, but ‘Let Her Go’ was so easy. I was no more pleased with it than any other song I’d written.

‘Hell Or High Water’ was written after the end of a relationship, and I do feel like every Passenger album has the obligatory break-up song.

I think we’re all survivors, to be honest. I mean, some of us more than others – some of us have to survive far more horrendous things than others. It’s all relative: whatever your experience is.

I dropped out of school at 17 ’cause all I wanted to do was play music. I had odd jobs on the side of gigging until I turned 22, when I was lucky to start doing this full time.

We plan tours months in advance, and you leave a few days off here and there where you feel you’ll be tired after some shows, but if other opportunities keep coming in, those days get swallowed very quickly, and it’s an impossibility to get this stuff right.

For me, it’s always just about playing the song and recording it and giving it what it needs as a song.

‘Heart on Fire’ didn’t do as well as the last record in most territories, but South Africa is one of the places it did really well.

Ed Sheeran is a good mate of mine, and he just flies around the place doing every single bit of promo or gig or interview, and it’s no wonder that when you combine that with immense talent that he’s playing in stadiums and arenas around the world.

When I sat down with all the songs before recording, I realised I’d written a few songs specifically about places in America – there was this song about Detroit and another about Yellowstone National Park. My dad is actually American, so I wrote another song about that side of my family.

Before it happened to me, I’d look at other people who had become really successful and think, ‘What a dream. That must be absolutely everything they ever wanted.’ When it does happen to you, you realize yes, it’s incredible. But it also comes with a bit of a weird aftertaste.

You have to play to your strengths, and my strength is the amount of content I create.

Every time you go in to make a record with the same group of musicians, the communication gets better and better. You’ve got that joint experience, and you learn with every single one that you have on top of that.

I believe it’s important to put all of your energy into what you’re doing rather than doing an office job and trying to muster up energy for music. It’s been a real blessing to play music full time.

Its pretty humbling, because I go back to the places where I used to play for 13 people, and now there’s 1,500.

I think expectations are sometimes dangerous things. I think the only thing you can be sure of is that it won’t go to plan. I think that’s the only thing that’s definite.

America is a funny place; it’s a land of extremes, I think. There’s fantastic, and there’s gobsmackingly dreadful. In every realm you could imagine, they do extremes very well or badly, depending on how you look at it.

I think you’re in trouble if you start chasing what you’ve done in the past. You always need to move on and look forward and do something new.