"It’s a French movie. Came out, like, four or five years ago. It feels to me like the French The Godfather. That would be one way of describing it. It’s about a French-Algerian guy who goes to jail, and watching him work the system of being in jail amongst the — sort of, like, negotiating a specific French jail, and how he’s able to navigate a very tricky world of his Muslim identity, French identity, criminal identity and drug-dealing identity, all these various things. It’s super intense and a super beautifully laid out story. It’s a crazy-engaging movie. Came out in 2010. I would highly recommend that. [Director Jacques Audiard] came out with another movie called Rust and Bone in the last couple years. I just remember seeing [A Prophet] and I was really blown away by it. When I saw it, it genuinely felt like watching The Godfather, watching Al Pacino as a younger man slowly navigate and figure out how to dominate a world that seems to be, you know, overwhelming him."

"Some of Dirty Projectors’ records were a little bit impenetrable, because Dave Longstreth obviously had some really crazy concepts. A whole record was about Don Henley. Then they moved into stuff that was still really innovative, but a lot easier to understand and enjoy, even if it had very eccentric meters and rhythms and melodies. I collaborated with Dirty Projectors on a couple songs for a charity record, and at our performance at Radio City Music Hall, I met Annie Clark [of St. Vincent], who I was a big fan of already. Then we crossed paths again at a show Björk did with Dirty Projectors at Housing Works [Bookstore in New York]. The Housing Works crew saw Annie and I enjoying the show, and they approached us about doing something together. The idea was that we would do it at the bookstore, which never happened. We certainly donated money to them, but by the time we did an album and tour together, it became a bigger thing than something we could do at Housing Works."

"It’s just timeless space-age music. Music that was recorded with so little technology, and yet it sounds so technological. It’s spontaneously recorded and spontaneously mixed, and yet it sounds like it’s been arranged, by four thousand producers, four million Trevor Horns. But it was just two blokes pushing faders up and down with a couple of space echoes. It’s an amazing sound, and it’s amazing what they did in Jamaica, especially people like Lee Perry and King Tubby. Sonically, they transformed music. It was quite difficult to get hold of at the time: there was one shop in Finsbury Park, which was quite a threatening place to go if you were a young spotty skinheaded kid. I remember Johnny Rotten used to go there, but he was a bit more fearless I think! But there would be house parties where you’d hear a bit of it, and it would filter into places like Rough Trade, and spread to Rock On in Camden Town, and you’d end up, er, borrowing lots of records that you never gave back…"

"I love that whole album, Coney Island Baby, I like the whole way that album was done. It’s got a cooler, very studio thing going on with all these ‘Oohs’ and ‘Ahh’s’ on the vocals all over the place. “With ‘Crazy Feeling’, I can’t be sure, but I think I heard it on the radio when it first came out. I think I was going to kindergarten somewhere; that was the ‘60s for me! I heard that ‘bum, bum, bum’, that sort of that chiming thing that goes on, and I really liked it and the sound of the guy’s voice singing. “At this point, it could’ve been a vivid dream that I’m remembering, but I think it actually was that song that I heard that on the radio and mixed in with everything else it caught my ear, at whatever age I was, whenever that song might’ve gotten a couple plays on a radio station. We would’ve been listening to a New York station at that time, living in Connecticut, or a Connecticut station"

"We've played with them quite a few times over the last couple of years, getting to know James Murphy and hearing that music in unexpected places. I love them now. I think I loved them too late, now they're broke up or whatever, but I love them. It's hypnotic, [like] we're going to grind away and discover the nuances. It's not about a big giant arrangement that takes you up and down, it's about being on the edge and going, and going, and going. They did that well, he had a great band. And their sounds are important, it isn't just guitars and keyboards. We'd see them play and they'd take a lot of effort to get these little sounds that all work together. We got to know that record by it being around all the time, which is great, because you're not just putting it on and going 'What is this shit?'. You're just hearing it and going 'What is that, that's cool?'. 'Dude, it's LCD Soundsystem.'"

"The first thing I should say is that it's not necessarily in order of favouritism. It was purely just well, what can I put down, and then rifling through and changing my mind and then going on to something else. But Flipron are a band that when I had a recording studio they turned up and said something like we've got a hundred quid, how much time can we have. And I just really liked them and I really liked the songs that they'd got. So two years later they were in the studio and we became firm friends. I produced a couple of records for them as well. But it's a funny thing because I prefer the stuff I wasn't involved with, of which this album is one. My studio closed down and we all went off and did our own thing and then they turned up with their first two albums. And with this one I just really love the songs on it. Each one is kind of like a story."