"Around this time I started heading out on tour and The Gaslight Anthem really started moving. It was just after The ’59 Sound came out. That was when I started learning about the music industry and how it all works, and how insincere it all is. People pick you up and spit you out. I was taking a drive one day and I heard The Promise by Bruce Springsteen come on the radio. But it wasn’t the album version; it was just him and a piano as it appears on an album called 18 Tracks.” This song opens with the lyrics: ‘Johnny works in a factory / Billy works downtown / Terry works in a rock and roll band / Looking for that million dollar sound.’ Then towards the end of the song he says: ‘The promise was broken, I was far away from home / Sleeping in the back seat of a borrowed car.’ I remember being on tour and sleeping in the back of a car that wasn’t mine, and I heard that line and I was like, ‘I don’t know about this whole thing. I don’t know if this is right. What do I do?’ As Springsteen sings: ‘The promise is broken, you go on living / It steals something from down in your soul.’ That’s when I realised that music wasn’t about the rock star dream. It’s about connecting with people, but that’s not enough for the industry. They see you as a product and they want you to make money, and I understand that, but it’s never enough for them. They’re never satiated and they’re never satisfied. It’s a beast with a belly that will never be filled. “I’d feel a sense of dissatisfaction after every tour and I’d come home and get in my van and just drive. I’d drive around habitually for one hour playing The Promise on repeat, just to clear my head. The song made me feel like I wasn’t alone, like someone understood me. It was a huge, huge song for my development, and it always put me back in a perspective that I wasn’t alone. And even though it’s a depressing song and there’s not a lot of advice in it, it makes sense to me. I still feel good when I listen to that song."

"Those Éthiopiques reissues were so amazing. This was the 21st one of those - it was a collection of some of her recordings. She was known as ""The Singing Nun"". The reissues introduced me to Ethiopian music. I'd never heard any before then, and I think that's probably true for most people. I was so bewitched by it. When I heard the Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou album I was totally blown away. The first thing I thought of when I heard it was Thelonious Monk. He was an obsession of mine when I was a piano-playing teenager. It also made me think of Debussy and Satie and stuff - the way the harmony just hangs there in suspension. Her playing - the manual element of it, like the way you can hear her fingers moving around the keyboard, reminds me of Monk and Mingus and those more idiosyncratic jazz musicians. It's so beautiful. This was the beginning of me thinking that Ethiopia was a really interesting culture that I knew absolutely nothing about. My wife and I moved to London into a little flat on Caledonian Road and there were lots of Ethiopian restaurants around there - it was a little hub for the Ethiopian community. Getenesh, the owner of this restaurant Kokeb, we were there so much that she took us in and adopted us. We still get phone calls from her if we haven't been there for a long time. I think it was the music and that, and right before Swim came out, my wife and I were basically not going to see each other for a year because I was going to be away so much, so we decided to go on a trip and do something special together. So we went to Ethiopia and I fell in love with this record all over again. It's such a distinctive place with a distinctive musical culture. When you're there all you hear is Ethiopian music. There's no Bieber or Western music. I thought the album was a totally undiscovered gem, a rare thing, but I heard two people that had my favourite track on the record as their ringtone! That blew me away. Imagine if somebody over here had Benjamin Britten on their phone. It gave me a sense of what a deep-rooted and proud musical culture it is."

"I came to this record through the Encyclopaedia Of Jazz. As a teenager I played a lot of jazz piano, but more like learning how to play bop or more traditional types of jazz. And I was getting to the point where I was starting to find out about Sun Ra and some of the weirder stuff that was out there, and I was working through the encyclopaedia and I crossed every record off the list if I thought it would be far out and interesting. We had a scam going at the time. HMV in Toronto was pretty relaxed and you could return things for cash value immediately. So I'd go in and buy a stack of ten CDs and I'd just got a CD burner - this was like 1997 - so I'd take them home and burn them all and then take them straight back. And they'd be like, ""You've got the entire recorded work of The Beatles here - you didn't find anything that you liked on there?"" And I'd be like, ""No these are all rubbish, sorry."" And I did the same with John Coltrane. Then I can remember getting to the Albert Ayler page of the encyclopaedia and you know how there's that snooty canonisation thing with jazz music where somebody like Wynton Marsalis or one of those conservative types would be like, ""This guy lost the plot. He went off the deep end."" But this record blew me away. I got this and Interstellar Space, the John Coltrane album, and they both have long periods of free-form wildness on them. But the thing I loved about Albert Ayler is the melodies on the songs - again, a lot of them sound the same, but they feel so elemental to me. It's another record where I feel like those melodies have been there since the beginning of time and it just took him to play them. The sound of his saxophone is so amazing. It's super far-out and forward-looking. If that's too out there for you, there's this album by him called New Grass, where he hired a rock band, and it's like some A&R man had tried to make him have a hit record. There's a song on it called 'Heart Love' - it's less far-out but it has his crazy saxophone playing on it, but with a beautiful melody and this free-soul singing on it."

"I came to Beefheart late. As a youngster, a lot of the older lads were into Beefheart but I didn’t like the way they dressed or their attitude I didn’t think they were cool. They were borderline radical hippies and I wasn’t having any of that. It didn’t look like fun to me. So I steered cleared of Beefheart. And then years later, somebody sat me down and played me Trout Mask Replica and I went, "oh my GOD!" and went out and bought everything. It was his use of language – he was writing like an abstract impressionist painter, fusing together chunks of English language that made more sense to me than something written straight. He was writing emotions through raw chunks of images that were coming to him. He was the first lyricist that made complete sense to me. Then I read that this music that I’d thought was badly played was in fact played amazingly well. He would write these very emotional piano pieces and then hand them to the guitarist who was the MD (musical director) and say, score that for the whole band to play. Often they weren’t even played to a rhythm – they were kinda random – and the band had to play along with them. They’re astonishing renditions of something that is so abstract that it needs great musicians to play them. He was fusing the blues and finding new ways of playing it. Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller) is one of his later albums where he returned to the style which people loved – trying to be less commercial than his Virgin Records years. There’s a track called ‘Tropical Hot Dog Night’, (quotes lyrics) “like two flamingos in a fruit fight… Everything’s wrong, at the same time it’s right… Like steppin’ out of a triangle into striped light” – and this reminded me of my drinking years. That’s exactly what it was like, where you’re in shadow and you’re in white light. This man knows exactly what’s going on in my head. He wrote such beautiful poetry. In later life, I made contact with him through Anton Corbijn and he’d send me music of his that wasn’t quite so well known. But I never got to meet him sadly. As a painter he was a massive influence on me because his titles were so fantastic. I take that same approach when I’m titling paintings for exhibition."

"I've been listening a lot to that record lately. My desire to be a musician started with my love with his band. My first exposure to him was probably Caribou, because my friends had it. My dad got me Elton John's Greatest Hits, then I think I discovered Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Madman Across the Water, Captain Fantastic... And later on, I started to dig back, that's when I really got into Tumbleweed Connection. It's got a real kind of Americana into it. I think, it’s my impression, that Elton has a kind of a love affair with America. Maybe some kind of country music elements in that, as well as pop and rock & roll. And it just has a southern feel to me. ‘Country Comfort’ and ‘Amoreena’ are two of my favourite songs in that record, they're just so fucking well done. I'd met Elton a handful of times and he's always been a very knowledgeable guy, very interested in the band. He's asking you about certain tracks, and this and that like he's actually listening to our stuff, the kind of shit an assistant's not telling him before he walks in. I kind of learned this around the time he ended up recording for our song [‘Black Gives Way To Blue’]. He's a big fan of Alice In Chains. He keeps up on what comes out in all sorts of music as a fan himself, very fucking knowledgeable. You know, to ask a guy who's your number one musical inspiration to play in one of your songs... that means the world to you. We never expected him to say yes, but you don't know unless you ask. So I wrote him a little e-mail, explaining the significance of that song, especially through what we were moving out of, that we wanted to honour Layne, that we wrote that song as a making peace and saying ""goodbye my best friend"", and moving on with the band, to live a new chapter of the same book. That itself was huge, and then for Elton to listen to that song, and get that, like: ""I wanna be a part of that, I think it's a beautiful song. The emotion is very genuine, and I want to play piano on it."" Pretty mind-bungling stuff. One of the coolest things that has ever happened to me and to the band."

"Along with Sufjan, I think Regina Spektor is the other genius of this generation. I could have picked a number of Regina's records. Soviet Kitsch is the crossover, when she became accessible to a larger audience. Her first two records are records that only if you are slightly bipolar and, like me, a fantasist in music, are going to love. Soviet Kitsch found the language that was going to meet that wider audience. The songs are crazy masterpieces. They straddle a line between pop – there are catchy choruses – and craziness. 'Us' is one of my favourite songs ever written and will be played at my funeral. I got into Regina because I had bumped into her producer [Gordon Raphael], who was also the producer for The Strokes, at a festival. He has just finished working with her and he raved about this crazy woman who would play piano while hitting a drumstick against a drum stool. I had to go and check her out after that. Soviet Kitsch is astonishing, as are the ones that follow. I saw her play at The Greek in LA and realised I was watching genius. I couldn't write a song for three months after seeing her show, as I was so in awe at what I had witnessed. I have never had that experience happen before. I went back and bought every single piece of her music and for three months listened to her day and night, trying to work out what the fuck she was doing. I still haven't worked it out. I think she is channelling – she is a witch and she is channelling and that is all there is to it. I fell in love with her and was lucky enough to meet her. I was even luckier to become friends with her and her husband, and it has been amazing to have her as a genuine friend. Her husband, Jack [Dishel], made this fabulous YouTube video [:DRYVRS] with Macaulay Culkin and it became a viral sensation. Jack is fantastically talented and a natural-born stand-up comedian. He will have you belly-laughing whenever you talk to him with his honesty and gawkiness. I haven't told many people that I have become friends with both of them, and I am a little shy about telling you that."