"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"."

"Well that was a big influence for their take on Americana, and I just like the juxtaposition of their extreme Britishness and singing about Oklahoma. And it's funny, Ian Svenonius has this whole thing about how Americans only accepted black music once it was taught to us by our British overlords. The Beatles and The Stones lacked the context to realise that maybe it's inappropriate to take on this Southern accent. I feel like Ray Davies has a little more tact, like, "No, I'm not going to sing like that!" A lot of the time I will sing in a kind of an English accent - not total English, but definitely more English than country, because my context is growing up and listening to The Beatles and thinking I like the way John Lennon sings it. It's easier not to sing a hard "r", it always sounds country when you sing an "arr". I would never do a Jamaican accent. I'll leave that to Sting. Once again, see we forgive Sting, 'cause he doesn't have the context."

"Again, a similar time in my life; I was listening to a few American psychedelic bands. There was a band called Long Ryders who did a track called ‘Looking for Lewis and Clark’ that I played, learned, used to sit and sing although I had no idea what the lyrics were. I was pretty much singing nonsense, although the song did get me into Tim Hardin! Anyway, they were one of a few bands [that were important to me], like Opal, Screaming Trees and Rain Parade, but Rain Parade was the one that changed me. This album was like an explosion in my mind. I don’t know what program it was, but I saw them perform ‘No Easy Way Down’ on TV, a filmed concert, and it was like, ‘Here is something I can fully get behind.’ It’s a slow, sludgy, drone rock anthem; the guitarist is doing the Kevin Shields tremolo thing with the guitar, but in 1985. It’s just incredible, and I have to say would have been pretty influential on the early Ride sound for sure."

"One of the nice things about being on EMI at the beginning of the 80s was they basically let you come in and get as many records as you liked. So I got an awful lot of classical records and worked my way through them. There's only so many things on the contemporary catalogue that were that interesting. You could get a Wire record. You could get this and that, but a lot of that stuff wasn't that interesting. Obviously, being a requiem, this is music for the dead. It's late 19th century, incredibly dynamic. I guess you'd say post-Beethoven, but more romantic, quite emotional. It goes from very, very simple, quiet, plain solo voice and it builds into this huge thing. It draws you in and completely absorbs you. It's like sailing on the sea. There are quiet bits where everything's still and then some storm comes and everything breaks into a furious tempest. It's something that I've been listening to for 30 years. It's something that I'll often play when I'm going to bed, weirdly."