"That first album, that sounds great to me. The first one we heard was ‘Heartbreak Hotel', because I don't think they ever released the Sun records - the RCA records came out first. We had a great friendship - I met him in 1965 the first year I went to the States. He was doing a movie at Paramount Studios, and I was at Paramount to talk about a song for a movie and they said 'Elvis Presley is filming here today, and he heard that you're coming over, and he'd like to meet you.' Like to meet me? I tell you, I didn't even know he knew I existed. I had three singles out at the time: ‘It's Not Unusual', ‘What's New Pussycat?' and a ballad called ‘With These Hands', and he had the three of them. He was walking towards me singing ‘With These Hands' - [impersonates Elvis] 'with these hands'. And then he said, 'How do you sing like that?' And I said, 'It's your fault, you were partly to blame!' He said, 'Well, you know, I come from Mississippi, I was born there, I was brought up with this stuff. What's it like in Wales? Are there any black people there?' I said, 'Only when they come out of the coal mine! No, it's listening to American music on the radio - that's where I've got it from.' He couldn't believe that somebody could sing like me not being influenced first hand, like he was - the gospel thing, listening to gospel groups and blues clubs like that. He preferred a lot of the later things that he did. I said, 'That early stuff on Sun Records, man, I mean jeez'. He said, 'Ah, it was very primitive - we didn't have very good equipment and it's a lot better now."" And I said, 'But there's fire there', and he said 'I'm glad you think so."" But he didn't do them on stage. I said, 'You want to open with them, open with ‘Blue Suede Shoes'.' But no, he wouldn't do it. Then one time, on his own special, he starts to go into some ‘Whole Lotta Shakin'' and then he goes on into another, and he said, 'We could do this all night', so you could see he was really wanting to do it. But he wasn't thrilled with those early recordings, he thought he made better records later on.#"

"I've been listening a lot to that record lately. My desire to be a musician started with my love with his band. My first exposure to him was probably Caribou, because my friends had it. My dad got me Elton John's Greatest Hits, then I think I discovered Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Madman Across the Water, Captain Fantastic... And later on, I started to dig back, that's when I really got into Tumbleweed Connection. It's got a real kind of Americana into it. I think, it’s my impression, that Elton has a kind of a love affair with America. Maybe some kind of country music elements in that, as well as pop and rock & roll. And it just has a southern feel to me. ‘Country Comfort’ and ‘Amoreena’ are two of my favourite songs in that record, they're just so fucking well done. I'd met Elton a handful of times and he's always been a very knowledgeable guy, very interested in the band. He's asking you about certain tracks, and this and that like he's actually listening to our stuff, the kind of shit an assistant's not telling him before he walks in. I kind of learned this around the time he ended up recording for our song [‘Black Gives Way To Blue’]. He's a big fan of Alice In Chains. He keeps up on what comes out in all sorts of music as a fan himself, very fucking knowledgeable. You know, to ask a guy who's your number one musical inspiration to play in one of your songs... that means the world to you. We never expected him to say yes, but you don't know unless you ask. So I wrote him a little e-mail, explaining the significance of that song, especially through what we were moving out of, that we wanted to honour Layne, that we wrote that song as a making peace and saying ""goodbye my best friend"", and moving on with the band, to live a new chapter of the same book. That itself was huge, and then for Elton to listen to that song, and get that, like: ""I wanna be a part of that, I think it's a beautiful song. The emotion is very genuine, and I want to play piano on it."" Pretty mind-bungling stuff. One of the coolest things that has ever happened to me and to the band."