"I've got a great friend, Todd Robinson, who runs a shop called Luna Music in Indianapolis, and we've been on lots of road trips together in America over the years. We both bond over music like this, stuff that has an American alt-psych-folk-rock feel. I find it a really appealing sound, and it's usually lifted by a great voice. Gold Leaves have that with Grant Olsen, who has such a beautiful voice. It's part beautiful, part-weary, part-determined, part-resigned. The music, too, is all a bit casual on the outside, a bit Lee Hazlewood, a bit Scott Walker, a bit melancholy, but it all comes together into something really special. We played this driving down the Pacific Coast Highway. It was perfect.
"

"To find some stuff [for the reissue] I was opening the laptop that I made Nights Out on. When I finished that record the laptop was full so I closed it and put it away. When I was delving back in time I looked at my iTunes and I listened back to this album and suddenly realised that I know all of it really well! I think my girlfriend at the time was really into them, and she put them on and I thought ‘well I don’t like this at all’. I remember listening to his voice and thinking ‘I fucking hate this guy’s voice’, and then after not very long realising that I liked that he was owning his lisp and I started finding it exciting. I must have listened to that record way more than I realised because I know it all really well! When I was listening to it again after I opened up that old computer and for the first time I heard it as a record that definitely influenced a lot of more recent alt-rock bands. There’s a proper disco-y track in there, and it’s sprawling, there’s interludes… it’s a good record!"

"I got a cassette from a cousin of mine that had The Offspring, Smash, on one side and Nirvana's Bleach on the other. That was definitely the wake-up call of rebellion and antagonism, but the first record I really got into from thereon was Surfer Rosa. It felt so alien but so familiar. It really clicked on a bone marrow level that felt like it had pre-existed for me. I bought Death To The Pixies at the same time on tape from HMV in Oxford and I just became obsessed with that record. I listened to it again recently and it reminded me particularly about how I could connect with Frank Black's lyrics despite not being aware of any real narrative when I was much younger. I don't think Foals would exist without the Pixies. I love the oddness and the strangeness of the Hispanic/punk/pop influence - it should be wrong, it shouldn't work but it does, really well. More recently I re-listened to his lyrics and appreciated how humorous they are, which reminded me that things don't need to be too obvious or narrative-based, they can be just fragments of thought. It opened the gateway into everything that then consumed me for the next ten years (Oxes, Albini, Sonic Youth, Godspeed - the American guitar alt/post-hardcore/post-rock world). Without Surfer Rosa I may have stayed with Nirvana and The Offspring…"