"Growing up in America in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s every Sunday evening there was The Walt Disney Hour on TV and before they played whatever Walt Disney movie or animation that was on, they would always begin with ‘When You Wish Upon a Star.’ This was probably the first embedding of music into your DNA outside of something that your parents might listen to on the radio, this was something that was wholly your own, because this was children’s music. “Your parents would plop you down in front of the television set on a Sunday night and this was your hour of music basically, so for myself, Grasshopper and a number of other people this otherworldly song was really the first music that informed you. Whatever music was to come in your life, this was the first information that was literally downloaded into your bloodstream. “Early on in Mercury Rev we were using feedback and Grasshopper was using guitar elements, because we’d yet to learn how to score orchestrally ourselves, we were just too young. Yerself is Steam was our early attempt at orchestrating but we were using feedback and noise and basically any note we could grab on the fretboard or the piano, because we weren’t really accomplished rock musicians. Like everyone, when you begin you sort of fumble around. “The idea of the layering and the dynamics that are in some of those very early Disney movies, such as Fantasia or Pinocchio was definitely in our consciousness. It was definitely one of the few things we could lean on as teenagers."

"For me Pavement were my favourite band of the 90s and they really defined the 90s for me better than Nirvana or any other band, because they were shambolic and had elements of all the things that came right before them like the Sonic Youth era and the grunge period. Malkmus was such a literary voice and they were such a great band in spite of being everyone living in a different city. They hardly ever rehearsed and their songs were always thrown together in some way but they made this music that inspired me almost more so than anybody else at the time. I would listen to them and see them live and it really moved me in a very basic sense. I felt it was very sophisticated in spite of it being a little shambling and rambling on stage and maybe that was part of it. They were never really a tight band. They never cared to be a tight band. On stage things were a little bit messy and blurry and that maybe was part of their charm, it showed that that didn’t matter in a way. What they were getting across was something that was nothing to do with whether they were a tight rock band with heavy riffs or whatever. Sonic Youth always prided ourselves on being really well rehearsed. We were super rehearsed most of the time and could really kick it out and Pavement was not like that at all. Yet they were really impressive and powerful in this kind of shambling way. I always loved the songs."