"The record came out in October and Roc Marciano is like a national treasure, basically [laughs]. The record KAOS that we did together is just fucking ridiculous and I couldn't wait for it to drop. I wanted to include it because when I heard what Roc had done, I felt the same kind of excitement I felt with some of those early records which is rare for me. He's created a whole different style of subcultural, subversive music right now and he's undoubtedly one of my favourite MC's. His work is mad, original and extremely lyrical like GZA. Like every line he writes, you could make a fucking movie out of each one. To work with somebody, I've got to click with them and I've got to meet them and if it's cool, we do some music together. It has to be like that for me. I've worked with everybody I ever wanted to work with growing up and now, I really like picking artists and working with artists that aren't really well known but who do something extraordinary. This project was all just about getting up, creating art and having fun and just enjoying myself. I've been producing people's music my whole life and I've turned down working with a lot of big pop stars for a lot of money because I just like doing my own thing and it has to be right. I don't like making a beat for someone and just giving it away – it has to be something I love and something I enjoy, which is what this project was all about."

"In the UK people know Jeffrey Lewis. He is this artistic polymath, he does comics, he's one of the most talented people I've met in my life, he can do anything. I feel if you looked into his notebook it would almost be like looking tin DiVinci's notebook. He can draw anything, write anything. He's got a lot going on, but he's also a super humble guy. This is his first album which he put out through Rough Trade. When I first heard his music I felt it was actual folk music from someone who'd grown up in the East Village. It felt like I was hearing a document of a great person who someone had recorded on a hi-fi in someone's home. He just played his diary to music, but it happened to so interesting and he happened to be a genius so you could put it out as an album. The way Jeff tells a story is unique. He lets words unfold in a way that only someone like Eminem or Notorious BIG – or someone that good! – can. It's great watching someone listen to his songs for the first time: 20 seconds in they're interested; a minute in they're trying to process all the information; three minutes on and they're getting even more intense, but by the end they're 'I cannot believe a person could make a complete statement in something so concise!' His music is like a mathematical proof. You don't realise at the beginning of a song what you're getting into and by the end Jeff has floored you!"

"Robyn Hitchcock is another one of my songwriting heroes. He gets a special fucking prize for following his songwriting impulses better than anyone on the planet. He's so wonderfully unapologetic in his songwriting style that I think he really influenced me to remove filters. His songs often follow a kind of inner logic unto themselves. I probably got Globe of Frogs when I was 15 or 16. I look back at the music I was listening to then when I was fermenting as a songwriter, and I was obviously really influenced by the things I was listening to. Robyn Hitchcock's songwriting sort of gave me blanket permission to write about anything I wanted to – because he did. While I had my sad, emotional, poetic music off to this side, with the Cure and Leonard Cohen, Robyn Hitchcock opened up a whole world, off to the left – 'You can write about anything!' And also, like a lot of these people, he's just a fantastic songcrafter with a hooky sense of melody. I could go on and on about Robyn Hitchcock, but as far as full albums go, Globe of Frogs holds up the most, with every song being genius."

"I've made a really valuable association with a gent from Los Angeles, Mr Ben Merlis. I quite admire Ben as a performer – he's a bass player in a pretty lively band, they travel out of LA frequently. And like much of the stuff we're talking about, you have to dig deep to find something of value. I found this through Ben. There's an ambience here, the unsettling presence of impending doom, which is part of the environment that we step into day by day in this contemporary world. It's part of what we have to exist with. 

I was talking with Terry Manning and Joe Hardy from our recording studios in Memphis and we got onto this topic of ambience. There was once a constant struggle to overcome background noise, the hiss of tape passing across the recording head. However, when absolute digital silence came into play, it was very unsettling. It's not in our genetic code. You can enter an anechoic chamber, which eliminates all sound, and very quickly it's so disturbing that you want out."

"Dirty Mind is the first one where I feel Prince became the Prince we all know and love. There had been somewhat suggestive lyrics with 'Soft & Wet', which came out earlier, but this is where he went full force with songs like 'Sister' and 'Head'. The record cover, the whole package, really says something to me. Instead of looking like a black guy from Minneapolis, he looks New Wave and you can't really tell what he is. He's got bed springs behind him and the album is called Dirty Mind, the first song is called 'Dirty Mind' and it just hits you over the head with this new direction. Maybe my favourite song on the record is 'Partyup', the last song on it. I understand there's rumours that he sort of traded that song with Morris Day. He said if you give me that song I'll record an album for you or I'll put together The Time For You. It's just an amazing song. Spoon covered it a long time ago for this Prince compilation."

"All of his albums are just collections of songs because this was in the pre-album era, but I guess there was one in Mississippi called Key To The Kingdom. He was a spiritual blues singer who played an instrument, a fretless zither. Even though it's the blues era, he can't bend the notes like a guitar player would. He's sometimes known as George Washington Phillips. His music is really serene and otherworldly and pure. It's all very religious but it has its own atmosphere that I've not really heard anywhere else. I think when I really got into Washington Philips was when Sonic Boom put a song of his onto a compilation album called Space Lines. My sister painted a picture of him for Christmas. My sister the painting goth."