"They famously reformed last year and I've seen them a couple of times and played on the same bill with them. One of my great regrets was that I came to this album a couple of years after it came out and my friends had all been to the show when they came through town and I missed it. It felt like a concert I should have been at. Part of it was that I hated guitar bands. In high school I was into terrible progressive rock like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes, while all my friends were into Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth. I always thought I was in the right and it was them who was barking up the wrong tree, which subsequently has made me a little bit embarrassed, because it was the 90s - I should've been listening to Sonic Youth. But I was firmly committed against guitar music and it was the same friends, like Ryan [Smith] - who's in my band now playing guitar and keyboards and other stuff, and who's been my friend since I was 11 or 12 - who was the guy in the Dinosaur Jr. T-shirt trying to get me to play organ chords in the background for his band, and I was grumbling away, ""When the fuck do I get my solo?"" And he introduced me to Neutral Milk Hotel. It's kind of an obvious way in for me, because it very much has that sound - the spiritual free jazz and the horns and the power and the instruments from around the world, different bagpipe kind of instruments - for me, it has that same spirit and wildness. It's also one of those albums, like the Pharoah Sanders, where the songs are all essentially the same song. And I don't mean that to diminish the achievement of this record because I think it's amazing, but when you have a record where you listen to the first song and the melody is so elemental to me - it's like it existed before this album was written - and then later on you hear another song and it's the same melody but inverted. Not in a technical sense, but you get the impression that these songs all come from the same tree and I love that. That's one of the things that the album format can do - tie things together like that. I've done that myself consciously on my records in the past - reprised a melody. On Our Love there are two songs that are essentially the same song revisited - 'All I Ever Need' and 'Your Love Will Set You Free'. Not the melody, but the underlying riff and the harmony."

"I got into Neutral Milk Hotel by accident. Richard Reed Parry from Arcade Fire mentioned this song on an interview, and I explored it and found the Aeroplane record. It was like discovering a secret. There are very few records that I’ve had that relationship with - you hear it and you don’t want to share it with anyone. “The story of the record is so unique and a bonus as to why I love it. Jeff Mangum hadn’t been taught about the Holocaust in school, so when he discovered Anne Frank’s journal in his mid-20s', he picked up this book and was like ‘What’s this?’ ""We take it for granted that we know Anne Frank’s story from a young age, but imagine if you stumbled across that book without the context? It would be incredible, and so it had this profound impact on him, to the point where he kind of invented a relationship in his subconscious mind with her, whereby they were old friends. It became like a soulmate relationship where he got to know her through his dreams. “He practiced lucid dreaming in the making of the record by waking up and putting himself back on the edge of sleep. He managed to have these lucid dreams that he could control; where he could walk through passages in his imagination and he got to know Anne Frank through that space. ""All the songs were written in this otherworldly space, and that’s why it’s quite a surreal record lyrically. I visited Anne Frank’s house listening to In the Aeroplane over the Sea and it created an even stronger bond between me and the record. “Also, around 2013, Mangum announced some really intimate shows. It was about thirteen years since he’d toured the record, and I believe he’s got bipolar and is very reclusive. I somehow managed to get tickets to his Union Chapel gig, and for the author of a cult record like that it’s a very small venue. We just sat there and wept, it was like a funeral. There was this incredible sound when he was performing, and I looked around me and realised that the sound was the whole audience singing the lyrics under their breath. “No one wanted to disturb his performance by singing but everyone in the room had this profound connection to the songs. He came back on for three encores and when he finally left the stage the security couldn’t get people to leave. They were refusing to leave the pews, stomping, in fits of tears. It was like a divine presence had just left the building. “This song has been my medicine at different times in life, curing me from different struggles like mental health or loss. Its music that has never failed to move me."