You're currently spending a lot of time in Sweden. How did you fetch up there?

I went up there to start working on a different project, and now I've started to develop some roots. I've met a bunch of amazing people, and they've taken me under their wing a little bit, because they can see that I'm excited about learning Swedish. Most of them are musicians, so we have that connection as well.

There's no imperative for you to learn Swedish, as many of them seem to speak better English than we do. Is that part of your general inclination towards modern languages?

For me, it's about having a deeper connection. If you really want to get to know them, you have to learn the language. If you don't learn Swedish, then you're always standing on the outside a little bit.

How many different tongues have you acquired?

I continue to deepen my knowledge of German, Russian and Spanish, and I work on my French. I'm really into Dutch; in fact, it's my favourite right now.

After your former band The Czars broke up, you made a living as a Russian medical interpreter, working in a New York hospital. Was that a period where all musical activity ceased?

I just didn't have time for it, and I wasn't seeking out musicians in New York. I worked at a high-class New York restaurant called Gramercy Tavern, and that took up about 90 per cent of my energy. You really do receive an education. You learn about food and wine, and especially cheese. We were constantly taking classes on how cheese is made, and where it comes from. And we had classes on Madeira, Calvados, Armagnac, Cognac, Champagne…

The songs you wrote for Queen Of Denmark dig deeply into your own emotional experiences. Is there a psychological price to pay for having to drag these songs around with you on tour, long after you've had the experiences which created them?

I find it fulfilling, but I've had that thought a million times. In other artists' lives, you see these drastic changes, which people say they don't understand. That is the result of what you're talking about. As for the relationship that caused me to write many of those songs, it probably was more difficult to let go, because I was reliving a lot of the feelings that I had for that person on stage every night.

At some point, in order to move on from certain things, you have to move to different subjects.

When you finish a show, what sort of emotional state are you in?

Sometimes I just want to break down and cry, and sob for an hour. And most of the time, I feel elated; I feel euphoric. A lot of times, I go out and talk to people afterwards, and that takes a good hour and a half to two hours, if you're listening to what people have to say to you.

That might be to do with their own reactions to the songs, and how they relate to their own lives. So they might be sharing quite detailed personal stuff.

Exactly. And it's really, really heavy duty. And you just want to say, "Who gives a ---- what you think?" It would never occur to me to walk up to somebody and tell them those things.

That's the culture we're in. Social media encourages that. You get the chance to be rude to people in public life.

Yeah, you have to take the good with the bad. But those people are not usually telling you that they don't like a song in order to hurt you. They're usually doing it because they want to enter into a dialogue with you. They really respect you, and they feel like it's OK, since they love you so much already.

So you're called upon to have a lot of understanding, to try and see it from a different perspective.