"Generation X were impossibly good. They had the best drummer. The best bass player. The best guitar player. The best singer. And the best songs. Kiss Me Deadly was like a ballad, and when I heard them sing about a 'tube to Piccadilly' I was like, 'What is a tube?' 'What are these stations?' Back then punk rockers in my town would get beaten up for looking different. So yeah, I really identified with that song."

"Raspberry Beret', 'Paisley Park' and the title track was amazing as well. It's a great psychedelic cover, I guess a bit like Sgt. Pepper's…. I love the flute intro on the title track and that was a big goal for the musical - to have each song have this little virtuosic moment, whether it was a harmonised guitar solo or a little flute line or some kind of piano solo. We had a rule that you had to be able to air-play some instrument on any song and if you could do that you could still be excited listening to the album 20 years down the line. It's hard doing fully contemporary music like Yeasayer, where doing something like a guitar solo always seems like a little dated or cheesy - so you want to have that variety, like a saxophone that's going through a weird pedal or being chopped up by a sampler or something, but this was pure "let's get this trumpet solo to be really haunting"."

"One of the greatest players to ever pick up the guitar. Oddly enough, he started out as a drummer. Figure that one out. Not only that, but he was left-handed and a lot of the time he played right-handed models flipped upside-down. “Albert had been releasing singles for quite a while, since the mid-‘50s, but he’s probably best known for the phenomenal recordings he did for Stax in the ‘60s. This was his second album for Stax, and even though it’s comprised of singles, it works as a whole album. “And dig the backing band - Booker T And The MGs. You can’t ask for much more. Again, I call this album part of the ‘Mississippi mystery.’ How did Albert King get that sound? I don’t know. But it’s all right here. Songs like Born Under A Bad Sign, Crosscut Saw, The Hunter…man, they’re just the coolest. Guitar players who want to study a one-of-a-kind tone and hear a man who really knew how to bend a note can’t go wrong with Albert King.”"

"This goes up to the Chicago stuff. When all the Mississippi guys made it up to Chicagoland, the Chess Brothers started picking them up and made it possible for them to record some stunning material. “There’s so much good stuff here that I don’t even know where to begin. Louisiana Blues, Rollin’ And Tumblin’, Long Distance Call, I Can’t Be Satisfied – all of these recordings were turning points in that, once electricity entered the picture, bands with three and four people in them could do battle with Duke Ellington and Count Basie and 10-piece horn sections. “Muddy Waters had a very distinctive guitar tone. When he played a Gibson Les Paul goldtop, you could really identify the sound, and you knew who it was. Compared to BB or Freddy or Albert, his playing might not have been so fanciful, but his licks were stinging and ferocious. And he laid down a lot of Delta-based slide guitar, too. Just because he was in Chicago, he didn’t leave his humble beginnings behind."

"In more recent years, I decided if I was going to play acoustic punk music I wasn’t going to be the guy that just bangs on a guitar. I wanted to learn how to play guitar and use it to dictate what I needed to say, as well as my lyrics. So I took online lessons to learn about finger picking and I learnt Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits, note for note. I think it’s one of the most beautiful love songs in the world, and I love the fact that he doesn’t even sing it. He just talks it. I adore Mark Knopfler for that. He seems so unaffected in this song. He didn’t care about Wham! or Oingo Boingo or whatever was popular at the time. He just said, ‘I’m singing like this and I’m finger picking because that’s what I love.’ That goes right back to Bob Dylan for me: from Just Like a Woman to Romeo and Juliet. And when I finally learn how to play that song note for note I’m going to play it for people."