It’s been a pretty eventful year for me, even without any touring. Most significantly, it was the year when I reached the landmark of half a century! I’m not sure where the time went, but it seems I’ve been making records for nearly 30 years now, which seems crazy to me. Perhaps appropriate then that the year would begin with the recording of a new album To the Bone, which was released in August. It seems like with every album I’ve been able to say it’s the most successful of my career, and in an industry where the trend is towards declining interest and sales, I have to be extremely happy that interest in my output continues to grow, even if it does mean having to work twice as hard to promote it. A lot of that promotion was actually a lot of fun and brought many new experiences; whether it was filming the Nowhere Now video in the Atacama desert, working with Bollywood dancers, or watching my face get plastered with paint guns on a wall in East London, sometimes things got kinda surreal!

I always try to do something musically different with each record, since it’s important to me to feel like there is a sense of evolution, after all what’s the point of making the same record again? But that also makes for a more difficult commercial proposition, as you can’t expect your whole audience to go with you on the same musical journey. With this in mind, and the fact that I working with a major label this time, I expected To the Bone to be the most divisive album of my career, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a lot less divisive than I thought. Maybe that means it’s not as different as I thought, or it’s just that when it comes down to it most people respond to music in a very open way, and whether it belongs to one genre or another really doesn’t matter. Thank you to all of you who consider it among your favourite releases of the year, it’s been amazing to see the album and tracks showing up in so many end of year lists.