"I dropped out of university because the band was starting to be quite busy and my friend Daniel Stone, who was an artist, made me a mix CD. It had a different Daniel Johnson song called “Speeding Motorcycle” and when I heard it, I went down a Daniel Johnston rabbit hole. I’ve been down there ever since. “Johnston taught me a lot of lessons. When we started the band, I was the drummer, which was my first instrument, but when the lead singer left I reluctantly took over lead vocals. I really hated the sound of my voice and it's taken me many years to get comfortable with it. ""Johnston was the first artist I heard who really sang in his own voice, he had this really squeaky teenagers warble. It sounds like a kid lost in his own world, in a basement, pouring his heart out into a tape recorder. It had such a profound influence on me.When I discovered his music, between Making Dens and Twenty One, I felt that it was okay to not like your own voice, and it was okay that I’m not Morrissey or Thom Yorke - the people I was trying to emulate at that time. ""Discovering his music taught me that but it also taught me to sing your own truth, to tell your own story, and to not be afraid of revealing your ugliest and most private parts of yourself in your music, because that’s actually how people relate to songs. “A song is a place to hide your ghosts. When you write a song, you’re building a house for your demons to live in. I think Johnston taught me that too. Maybe with A Billion Heartbeats I’ve built a house for a generation’s ghosts, but I’ll have to let other people decide that"

"I’m going to end this list with a request that you also seek out Kurosawa’s Dreams after you see this movie. Dreams is my absolute favorite film of all time, and when you bookend it with Ikiru, the experience is quite amazing. Ikiru is the story of a long-tenured public servant who discovers he only has a year to live. He makes a last-ditch effort to bring meaning to his existence by working tirelessly to build a children’s playground. It is the work of an artist feeling he has not done enough substantive work in his life—a romanticized notion that our daily routine is often meaningless save for a few charitable acts. It is our fears as a young mind. Over the years, Kurosawa would endure a tumultuous career that nearly ended in an act of attempted suicide. Now consider Dreams, a film coproduced by Steven Spielberg and featuring Martin Scorsese in a cameo as Vincent Van Gogh. These filmmakers, along with George Lucas, would rally behind Kurosawa in the ’80s and help him make a comeback with Kagemusha and Ran (both on Criterion), winning him a Palme d’Or and an Academy Award nomination while also bringing back to light his incomparable portfolio of works (Lucas would very often recount how The Hidden Fortress was the narrative inspiration for Star Wars). Dreams, to me, feels a bit like a representation of the playground that Kurosawa built through his works, and the children he inspired coming out to thank him for it. I can watch this movie again and again forever. Criterion has an amazing collection of twenty-five films by Kurosawa. I cannot recommend watching his entire body of work highly enough, as it is perhaps the best documentation of a commercial artist in the modern age."