"The Jackson Five is one of my favorites. Songs like 'The Love You Save,' 'I Want You Back,' and their cover of 'Who’s Lovin You' are up there with some of the greatest of all time. And here they were, a young family making their first record and having such an incredible impact. There’s nothing you can’t do! And the hits just came coming—it's hard to pick one record because I love so many other tracks that came later like 'Can You Feel It' and 'Maria.' There are too many to count!"

"I was either going to pick this one or Are You Experienced? but when Electric Ladyland came out there was a clarity to it and it was easier for me to figure the songs out. Because it was a double record it sounded much more organic and earthy too with songs like ‘Voodoo Chile’ and ‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return)’. Other songs like ‘Rainy Day, Dream Away’ meant that you just buried yourself in the music and it became so important to you. The record also had a really cool name!"

"The thing about Cat Stevens is I probably prefer Mona Bone Jakon as far as the songs and production goes, it's a little bit starker, a little rawer than the other ones, but the reason I picked Tea For The Tillerman was because of the song 'Father And Son'. It's not my favourite Cat Stevens song at all but it was written for a musical that was never made called Revolutia, a blended word of 'revolution' and 'Russia'. The song sort of doesn't make sense - why is this one guy singing both of these characters? It's Cat Stevens singing the high voice and the low voice - and you wondered, god, this guy was probably at the height of his worldwide fame and he's obviously a master craftsman, he can crank out the songs but why couldn't he get this musical made? Or maybe he didn't want to - it seems like he wanted to and it just never happened. Then he was like, oh, just put it out on the next album. And I think there's a couple of other songs that seem like they could be from that same musical - 'But I Might Die Tonight' I think is kind of similar. All these albums that I really love from the 70s and late 60s - David Bowie's Diamond Dogs or The Kinks' Arthur, and they are songs from musicals basically, but it doesn't make sense there's this one guy singing it. Maybe it's ego or something, but that's why I picked that album. I looked up on Wikipedia what the reviewers thought of the album and I think the Rolling Stone guy talked about "Cat Stevens' occasional overuse of dynamics", which was the thing we were trying to do with Break Line, make things dynamic - start small and get big, and it's just so funny that at that time a reviewer would be like, "I'm sick of all these dynamics - I want more compression!"

"It’s hard for me to narrow it down to my favorite directors and favorite actors, too, but I love Matt Dillon. I love Beautiful Girls and I love Flamingo Kid — he’s responsible for a lot of my favorites, but I’m gonna have to pick Drugstore Cowboy. I saw it when I was a kid and I felt like it was such a different culture than any that I’d ever been exposed to, and I felt like instantly I was a part of it — even though I had no frame of reference. I mean, I wasn’t a “kid,” I was 14 or 15. I had started getting into, you know, that sort of pretentious high school literate phase where you start reading, like, Kerouac and Ginsberg and, I don’t know — I loved that world, that romanticized, thuggy, kind of petty crime world. I really romanticized it myself and just wanted to be a part of that world; there was something exciting about that for me. And I love the way it’s shot. I love the drugged out scenes; I love the way [Gus Van Sant] shoots with cut-outs, those kind of simple, free-floating cut-outs to convey the psychedelic scenes. It was one of my very first exposures to that style of filmmaking that was a lot more patient and took its time and allowed itself to breathe. And from there I got into, like Hal Hartley and the independent movies of the ’90s. But my love of that type of film all started with Drugstore Cowboy."

"I hate saying this, but it did what it said on the sleeve! It was them two and it was a lot of drums. It was one of the first records I would listen to because a lot of jazz drumming is very difficult and complicated, if you listen to somebody like Buddy Rich you can't help but think how does he do that; what is he doing? How do you do that? It's very complex which always scared me off. Kenny Clare and Ronnie Stephenson had that same technical proficiency but they didn't use it the same way. They were much more in the mould of Gene Krupa. The parts that they'd play were very musical. I don't know if they were musical to people who weren't drummers, but to me it all made sense. Some of the stuff they did was almost melodic, like patterns on the toms and breaks, and then just trading off each other, which I thought was pretty cool because it was like hearing two people being inspired. Again that was something that really came in with The Damned, with Brian and me. It was almost like a competition sometimes: he would play something and then I would go okay, if you're going to do that then I'm going to do this. And I think that probably came to us from listening to these drum battles and taking on the mentality of that; feeding on what's going on around you, regardless of what it is."