"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."

"My Mother and Father were both in theatre and in some movies. My Mother was on Broadway in the ‘50s before I was around, in a musical, I think she was in it for two or three years. They always did things together, they were always getting the Broadway musicals and listening to them and getting into records. “Broadway musical cast albums are part of my earliest memories. I’ve been told that I would - as children can often do - absorb them and memorise it all, so on a family trip somewhere I would start singing them the whole way through. All of he songs in this musical or that musical, or whatever one they’ve been playing a lot of, or whichever one I maybe liked more and asked to keep hearing. “That’s been a big part of my writing; to have a storytelling aspect, a certain variety, a certain sense of those characters. It’s not all autobiographical, that’s often mixed in when I write and perform - to have that sense of playing or acting and storytelling. “This song is from Man of La Mancha. which was one of my favorites, that was one of the ones I could sing all the way through, and was one stayed with me more. Occasionally I would listen to it even when I was older than six years old, there’s something about a lot of those songs that connected with me. “With ‘Dulcinea’ in particular it’s the heartfeltness and the melody of it. And then it’s actually sung by other people with a different beat, a different groove and a different attitude, the same words are sung in a mocking and taunting way. “I was recently thinking of this - and I didn’t realise at the time - but to learn as a child that a song can be done in such different ways. The same song, the same words, the same chorus, the same melody, can be done as a sincere, heartfelt love, and then also could be done as absolute mocking, taunting and a violent aspect to it, instead of the most tender. It’s the same thing, but a different way and a different attitude. I think there’s something about it that I probably had taken in a very natural way, because I was hearing it. “Actually, from very, very early on, there was a Violent Femmes show or two that I sang a little bit of that song as a little intro to some other song that we did, because it seemed like it would be fun to do or it was in my head to do it. So it even made it to a Violent Femmes concert once or twice in the very early years of our band"