"I dropped out of university because the band was starting to be quite busy and my friend Daniel Stone, who was an artist, made me a mix CD. It had a different Daniel Johnson song called “Speeding Motorcycle” and when I heard it, I went down a Daniel Johnston rabbit hole. I’ve been down there ever since. “Johnston taught me a lot of lessons. When we started the band, I was the drummer, which was my first instrument, but when the lead singer left I reluctantly took over lead vocals. I really hated the sound of my voice and it's taken me many years to get comfortable with it. ""Johnston was the first artist I heard who really sang in his own voice, he had this really squeaky teenagers warble. It sounds like a kid lost in his own world, in a basement, pouring his heart out into a tape recorder. It had such a profound influence on me.When I discovered his music, between Making Dens and Twenty One, I felt that it was okay to not like your own voice, and it was okay that I’m not Morrissey or Thom Yorke - the people I was trying to emulate at that time. ""Discovering his music taught me that but it also taught me to sing your own truth, to tell your own story, and to not be afraid of revealing your ugliest and most private parts of yourself in your music, because that’s actually how people relate to songs. “A song is a place to hide your ghosts. When you write a song, you’re building a house for your demons to live in. I think Johnston taught me that too. Maybe with A Billion Heartbeats I’ve built a house for a generation’s ghosts, but I’ll have to let other people decide that"

"The age of innocence that was the sixties ended, it is often said, at Altamont Speedway, miles from the peace and love of San Francisco, one cold fall evening in 1969. The Rolling Stones, frustrated to have missed out on the Woodstock festival weeks earlier, chose this location to stage their own festival, and taking advice from Jerry Garcia, brought in local Hells Angels chapters to handle security, paying them with as much beer as they could drink. The concert was a disaster, and ended with manslaughter. The documentarian brothers Albert and David Maysles were there to film the run-up to the event, the performance itself, and the aftermath. Mick Jagger has never looked so lost onstage, nor would he be quite so out of control again. Strangely, it seemed only to fuel the Stones’ rise to power—but then, the Beatles were about to call it a day. Essential viewing for anyone who loves contemporary music and the culture that surrounds it."

"This felt like a dream, like being on acid again, like a new and technically ambitious cousin of “Last Year at Marienbad.” I enjoy thinking about the experience of watching it, probably more than the film itself. I was distracted, I kept looking for seams — where did they cut and stitch this together? How can it possibly be a single take? I’d rather have gotten lost in the world, which only happened after the fact as we drove home and tried to put into words what the film was actually about (and for weeks, I tried to figure out what the synopsis would be if I were to write one). I’m still not sure I love this film, but I am in awe of the ambition involved, and of the eerie tone, which never faltered. In particular the sound of those distant singing children. They were so haunting and dreamlike, I can’t recall the melody but I can still hear the feeling."

"I read about Sudan every day, and I didn’t understand what was going on there until this book. Dave Eggers tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, who walked across the country, the largest in Africa. And then Deng spent 13 years in refugee camps before being resettled in Atlanta. It’s a powerful story of what he survived. There are lighter moments in the book: He and his roommates buy a tampon box because they think it’s so pretty. And there are less-kind instances of American behavior in the book—Deng was held hostage in his home and robbed. I didn’t know that church groups had sponsored these men. There’s so much anti-immigration stuff going on in the States right now, it’s heartening to see that people worked to reach out to others who are in need of what our country has to offer."