"When I was about thirteen an older friend of mine made me a tape of DC hardcore. Making tapes is a lost art and I still do it, but you can get USB’s now that look like tapes. He made me a tape because I only knew Minor Threat and they were like a gateway drug for me. “This was the first song on there, it’s from the split record Void did on Dischord Records with The Faith in 1983. It’s funny, when Freddie was talking about what he liked and didn’t like, when you’re that age you’re constantly navigating through the sea of songs you actually really connect with and the ones you think you should like, because they make sense with the identity you’re trying to cultivate for yourself and I was floored by ‘Who Are You?’ “It’s everything that’s great about Punk Rock and everything that’s great about music when you’re a kid, that rage and that anger and also feeling completely misunderstood by everyone in your house, your family, your school or your hometown. I read that Kurt Cobain put this in his top 50 songs of all time and of course that makes sense, it’s a song about being misunderstood and that’s what Nirvana came to represent for another generation. “It’s Punk Rock at its best and like The Stooges song for Freddie, this really taught me that it’s not what you play it’s how you play it, as long as you’re being authentic, and Punk Rock is just authentic rock isn’t it? I was in a punk band and my first shows were in Southampton above a pub for this DIY collective called ‘STE’ - which stood for ‘Southampton, Totton and Eastleigh punk collective.’ Students got in for a quid and under 16’s got in free. It was great, there weren’t many women, but other than that it was a great way to ply your trade. “I’ll play it to you and when you hear the opening you’ll see what I mean. It’s this intro, this riff, it still excites me now, it’s just so brutal and the song’s a minute long. It’s so direct and to me it’s weirdly poppy as well, maybe I’m alone in thinking that, but it was a song that was really easy to connect with. It’s filled with rage and it’s one of those songs that you want to turn up so your parents can hear who you are and see where you are in your life."

"It's this live, spiritual thing from '66 - Alice Coltrane, his wife, and Pharoah Sanders is on it. It's just a really spiritual performance. At one point, he starts beating his chest and making Tarzan noises. This was one of the things I burned - that's more obscure, the others are more influential, but yeah, Temple University is in Philadelphia, so it was very close to home in that regard. There's a writer from Philadelphia, Francis Davis, I read one of his jazz books, I'm intrigued by that guy. I haven't met him but I really love his writing and he was there back then, he was going to Temple, he was at the concert, and he wrote a review that came in there. That's a great, intense live performance. I've always sort of been into the improv thing of feeling it in the moment spiritually, but yeah, I was listening to a lot of jazz records and it really opens your mind, just because they're all such real players. It's all live, it's not overdubs, it's just capturing a real moment of true feeling, especially when you've got the greats, like John Coltrane, or in this case, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali and they're all just such heavy people, you know? It's unreal."

"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."

"Loudon Wainwright III's Grown Man—it's hard to narrow down to any one album, but that album is important as far as when it came along in my life. And it's a classic Loudon album. I was shooting a movie in North Carolina. It was the first movie I did where I had a larger role, a movie with Sandra Bullock called 28 Days. It was about rehab. Viggo Mortensen was also in it and Margo Martindale and Steve Buscemi, and Loudon Wainwright, who's role was "Guitar Guy." I wind up going to set every day in a van sitting next to him. He didn't say anything, and I didn't have anything to say to him. We were just quietly going to work. So there was another actress named Susan Krebs, who's also a jazz singer, who was in the movie, and her and I got along. And Susan and I were talking about music all the time, because she's a singer and I love music. And one day she's like, "Do you know who Loudon Wainwright is?" And I don't. I have no idea. And she's like, "Come by my room. I have his new album. I'll play it for you." And she played Grown Man. And I was blown away. It was the perfect kind of music for me. He's a troubadour. He's a poet. The way that he uses language. He just does that thing with my brain where it just gives me glee and joy. I become that annoying guy going, "Back up, back up. Listen to the words. Listen to what he just said. You gotta hear how he says it. He coulda-said-this-but-he-didn't-he-said-that." So I after that first listen I went out to a music store, which used to exist before the Internet, and bought six other albums. And of course the next day when I sat in the van next to Loudon I'm like, "So, ha ha, Loudon. Alan Tudyk. Good to meet you. Uh, can we talk a little bit about Grown Man real quick?" He was very patient with me and talked through everything. I had a relationship that was kind of starting to fray at the edges. And most of Grown Man is about relationships under duress. On the album there's this song "Dreaming," which is one of his best songs I think ever. He actually played it in the movie as "Guitar Guy." It starts out "I'd rather be dreaming than living..." And it just resonated with me. When Loudon was on set playing this song live he sat in a hallway. I was not in the scene, so I didn't get to be on set, but he was right by a door that had a grate. Because we were filming in a rehab facility the door had this vent, like a fence on the bottom half of it. So I'm lying on the floor on the other side of that door just listening to him sing this song over and over and over again. I mean, come on. That's fucking special."