"Despite the fact I love all sorts of Crimson records, I think this is still my favourite. Maybe just for nostalgia reasons, I listened to this record when I was very young. Before I was into jazz, before I was into weird music, I always loved this. Obviously I grew up with The Beatles and the Stones and Floyd and stuff, but I remember I was in a car and Jimi Hendrix came on the radio. I said 'what is this?' I was only 12, and a guy I was with looked at me like I was insane. In those days gas stations had lots of cassettes so we pulled over and I bought a cassette that had Are You Experienced on side A and Axis: Bold As Love on side B. I listened to it until it was completely worn through. That was my introduction to the 60s stuff that I hadn't been brought up listening to. King Crimson's early stuff was among that new, exciting 60s music that I hadn't heard. Robert Fripp became my guitar hero, he used to do a League of Crafty Guitarists thing in New York so I saw him play. I became a Fripp head, I saw them play in the 90s with my English teacher. It blew my mind, but they didn't play the old stuff. I'm not musiciany enough to like that stuff, but the early stuff resonates a lot."

"I don't know much about her. We're going to be playing some shows with her, so I'm holding her in this great realm of mystery until then. The drummer is fucking amazing, Zach Hill - he played with that band Hella. They're playing this fucking insane music. I don't even know what their set up is like. I don't know what she's like, what her group is like. And in a way that's why I'm enjoying it so much at this time, because it's still new to me. You can go on the internet and find out everything about a group and before you know it you're meeting them, and that's a great thing about my life. But there's also times when you want to be suspended in the mystery of what you're listening to, and that's where I'm at with her right now. And what a weird name... Is that really her name? I like it when people can be technical, or use elements of technique. I love technique. I think technique has probably more beauty in it that the way I play - the punk rock, anything-goes kinda way. But if you're lucky, like Marnie Stern, you can do both. You get this ridiculous shit where they're all trying to play these intricate little bits together, and then, because they're weirdos, you get this other kind of music that you haven't heard before."

"We've been around them quite a few times in the last three or four years. They have a way of doing this hypnotic, simple, grinding-away thing. The guitarist, Ira Kaplan - he's crazy with all these delay effects, the way he's layering them up. We would end up listening to them almost by accident. There have been a couple of times where we would do these long drives and we'd put on a record like Boris or Yo La Tengo, and they'll have songs that go on for ten minutes, and you're getting into these big soundscapes that just dig into oblivion. We've really embraced that in the past couple of years: to find this perfect goal, a sound you can play over and over, and not necessarily get to a crescendo and back, but to get to the edge and stay there. And they do that great. There's a lot of good qualities about their group. They're fucking weirdos, they're just not a typical rock group. A lot of times, I feel like The Flaming Lips are a typical rock group. I mean, we're influenced by The Beatles. It's a bunch of dudes with long hair that do drugs. We're pretty typical. I try to remind ourselves that we like weirdos, although I don't always believe that we're weirdos ourselves. But we love the weirdos, and we love when they get the keys to the house and they can have their party that night."

"Like a lot of people of my generation, the first time I heard a Kurt Weill song was The Doors. You go half a lifetime without realising it was written by Brecht and Weill. Recently I went on a journey. I write songs with a guy called Reid Paley. He’s a very less is more, economical songwriter and you know there’s something about him that’s very tin pan alley. He wears a black jacket and a white shirt and has no problem banging out a song. He is not going to use a word like ‘thalossocracy’ in one of his songs. I felt I needed to get into the feel of Threepenny Opera - how has it survived all these years and spawned all these cover versions which are part of the jazz songbook? I really needed to educate myself and listen to that record ten or twenty times to hear the melody and the meter and the drama, what they put together, those dudes back in pre-WW2 Berlin. They were working really hard and we’re still talking about those records today. I was just enjoying it in and my wife was listening along upstairs. She was doing laundry and I was doing pots and pans. And she said: “I could listen to this all day long, whatever it is.” I don’t speak German so I’m missing a lot outside the English part of the libretto but I still love it."

"Burning Airlines Give You So Much More’ is from Eno’s solo album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). I love the sound of his early solo records, Here Come the Warm Jets was a massive album for Supergrass, I remember the tour manager, the crew and all of us listening to it and loving it, it was quite a defining record for us on those early tours. “There’s something about that early solo Eno sound that I really love, he was such a sponge in terms of how he picked up on things around him and a lot of the stuff happening in Germany around that time. It was the way he could put things together and the way that he would double-track his vocal, the dirt and the raggedness of the way it was performed. There’s so much about it that I really love and then there’s the odd, skewed, surreal lyrics, it’s a good recipe. He was a big inspiration for me definitely, another one that can do that throwawayness, which is really cool. “There’s some tracks on Here Come The Warm Jets that do a similar thing, where he could be quite tidy at times in the song structure and do something that’s almost quite friendly to listen to. It wasn’t always angular and weird and I think ‘Burning Airlines Give You So Much More’ could have sat on the Here Come The Warm Jets album really well, it’s Eno at his best."

"This is a bit of a change in mood from the last song! For a long time Rod was a hero and an icon to me. “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” is just such a confident song and I remember listening to it a lot as I was starting to perform. I think all artists have a different persona they go into, or a switch they hit when they walk on stage, I would listen to this as a warmup song to get to that place before I performed. “I was lucky enough to re-record the song with Rod Stewart about a year ago - one of those moments when it really came full circle for me. My A&R told me they were planning to do a Rod Stewart tribute album with a bunch of different artists. She first presented a different song and I said “that would be amazing! But I’m definitely doing “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy”, right?” I think I even kicked out somebody else who was in line to do it! We recorded it, produced it and then performed it together at the VMAs. “Now we have this cool relationship where I see him when I’m in Vegas and I’m going to try to see one of his shows. Rod Stewart is my rock ‘n’ roll dad! It’s one of those rare experiences when you can say ‘it’s nice to meet your heroes.’"

"Somebody gave it to me in the late nineties, just on a blank cassette and then yep, I was completely dubious, because when people mention Miles Davis or jazz in general, I would just think of those crazy funk-jazz things they did in the seventies, and I didn't know he was capable of this incredible orchestral soundscape. It helps that he's reading from an already fantastic piece of music but what he did to it was astonishing again, so I love it. It's just the most evocative record. Recently I had the pleasure of a train journey from Bilbao to Madrid and I put that on my headphones and it was like, "oh yeah, everything is cool". Actually, it didn't [unveil new layers to the record], as I think it was really cool to experience it on the train going through Spain and yet I always think that music is so powerful that the images that you have in your head if you're listening to it in your bedroom are as powerful, if not more so, than if you were in some incredible vista. After that I went back and bought the early Blue Note records, which are generally brilliant. I'm not a real jazz aficionado and if I've put on an old jazz record, it's mostly about mood, because I can't really understand what's going on. Whereas with Sketches Of Spain, it seems more orchestral, where I can understand what's going on better."