I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.

I come from an art-school background, and I still feel that in my music, it's about exploration and challenging myself, about putting myself in a place that's frightening because I haven't been there before.

I literally left school and went straight into music via art college for a year, and I've been so involved in my job of writing songs that the more actively involved part became channeled into standing on the stage and saying things that way.

I've always felt that I'm affected by the world, by the way we treat each other, by the way different countries treat each other.

I love 'Threepenny Opera'; I was exposed to it as a little kid because my parents, my mom and my dad, had bonded, when they were dating, over 'Threepenny Opera' and introduced it to me, a child, who could barely understand it. But I immediately gravitated even from that early age.

Children used to get bullied at school. Now they go home, and that's where the problem starts - because they sit on their phones all night, thinking about who's 'liked' a photo of them, who hates them, who loves them. They don't know what's real and what's not, editing their lives constantly to fit other people's views.

Every Palestinian family feels the effects of the international embargo. But the more the pressure on the government grows, the more support we receive, both from the Palestinian street and from the Arab and Islamic world.

The dilemma for society is how to preserve personal and family values in a nation of diverse tastes.