"I grew up with Kimya and watching her come into her own and write songs was inspiring. We would write songs together originally, then at some point she got a guitar and started writing songs herself. She borrowed my tape recorder and never gave it back! She took it into her room and started to make this record. I knew that she was amazing and a great lyricist because we wrote songs together, but I was shocked by how good this album was. My mind was blown by it. The lyrics are so good and so personal. When she made that record she made up her own genre of Kimya's of an incredible playful, introspective, symbolic, metaphysical diary of herself. It's part nursery rhyme, part fable, part confessional. She continues to explore that more and more. I have no idea how to describe this record properly, but it's coming from a very pure place. It's not so much this record has all her best songs, it was hard to pick just one of her solo albums, but this is the beginning of her journey. She offers you so much access to who she is on this record. The way Kimya rhymes is so clever, I just don't know anyone who can touch her."

"ARE YOU KIDDING?! Magical Cloudz?! Majical Cloudz is two guys from Montreal and this record is only two years old. I bought it on a whim because I was intrigued by the strange spelling and a friend had seen them live and said that it was one of the most startling experiences of his life. I didn't listen to it immediately, but a couple of days after New Year's, I was feeling crushed, it was raining, I had it on my headphones and there was something so private and discreet about it. It's all to do with the lyrics and the singer; the music is very understated, there's no real progression in the songs. Unobtrusive, discreet backdrops for what it might feel like stumbling across an AA meeting or a domestic argument or reading someone's diary. There's a confessional, disarming honesty about his lyrics, they're poetic - there's some imagery that adds to the strangeness in a way, but when I listen to it, I feel like I have a companion in my head, the same as when you fall in love with a book. Of all the records that have recently come out, it's the only one I feel like I'll be in love with for a long time, it's very special to me."

"I’m also a big fan of comedy as well, so even things to this day like Bridget Jones’s Diary, there was just something about Bridget Jones that I thought … And I guess it’s [Renée Zellweger‘s] performance. I remember there was a lot of talk about the fact that they cast an American in that role, but I think she captured the sensibility of a repressed English girl who was desperate to fall in love so beautifully And as an actor myself, often you caught slack if you’re playing a gay person and you’re not really gay, or you’re playing an American and you’re not really American, or you’re playing whatever it happens to be. I just think if you can find the essence in a character and pull it off, then it doesn’t matter where you’re from or what your nationality is, etc. There’s something to me about that film that’s like the perfect romantic comedy. I just think it’s a bit hard to put my finger on what it is, to be honest. It’s just beautifully executed. Everything’s so well balanced. Often whenever I read a romantic comedy now, I’m comparing it to Bridget Jones and if it’s planned well."

"Kristin Hersh is no ordinary musician, and her mind is unlike any other. In her memoir, Paradoxical Undressing, she captures what it’s like to be young and starting out, but this is a grazed reality, the top layer of skin stripped clean away. The book is based on a diary she kept when she was 18, which is, as she says, “the age when no one takes care of you”. It was a year when everything happened. She moved her band, Throwing Muses, from Providence, Rhode Island, to Boston. She was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, then bipolar. She was offered her first recording contract, with 4AD. She discovered she was pregnant. And she became unlikely friends with faded Hollywood movie star, Betty Hutton. “Betty sings about starlight and champagne,” Hersh writes. “I sing about dead rabbits and blow jobs.” Though Hutton was unpredictable and fragile (“Time is like a hurricane to her – a big, fast mess, sweeping her away”) she was also full of generosity, compassion and advice. “You have to leave things out to tell a story,” she once told Hersh. And Hersh listened. This female Kurt Cobain – he was a fan of her work – has forged her own brave path, often against enormous odds. And she writes better sentences than most writers do."