Little Miss Sunshine is a name someone called me one time and it made me laugh because I was such a bitch, I was so angry all the time and I hated everything, and it showed he didn’t really know me. I think that’s what women do, we feel like we have to have this sunny disposition, and I try, but I feel much closer to a whirlwind inside, volatile and tempestuous, swung around by constant cycles.

The album originally started because I needed a break from society. It sounds very dramatic, but I am very dramatic and I feel things too intensely a lot of the time. I was discontent with my life, London was so rainy, and I was yearning for sunshine and ease, so I made my own escapism in these songs instead, building my own world I could go to. About halfway through the process I realised I was picturing the same place whenever I was working on these songs—huge American Great Plains and great British mountains—and the songs felt like big landscapes instead of little self portraits, which took me out of my body.

I have spent a lot of my life trying to be small and trying to repress my emotions, but they felt too big, so I started looking at them as part of the natural cycles that everything has. Most processes in nature are a result of huge amounts of retention, repression and pressure until something has to give, and it felt like things were starting to give a bit. It was easier to understand how I feel by equating it to hurricanes or mountains, because it’s cyclical, it shreds and grows, it fluctuates and is in a constant reaction to everything around it, which is exactly how I feel.