"To Bring You My Love is my favorite PJ Harvey record, I was definitely obsessed with her at that point. She was doing something with the blues that not a lot of artists that I was interested in were doing, sort of making it contemporary. That record had a very natural sound, but it also had a real style to it. It was produced. I still reference To Bring You My Love when we make records. I had really come around to Wire and Talking Heads around this time too, and I started to like that kind of abstract lyrical imagery more than literal story telling. It made it easier to write lyrics, because it was easier to hide behind. At that point, when I was writing lyrics it was all about: What can I sing that won’t embarrass me standing up there onstage? And if you could latch onto something that had a cool meaning to it, that was a bonus. But it wasn’t the primary concern. Sometimes that can lead to a lot of really bad lyrics. And a lot of it is about taste: I didn’t know a lot about what Stephen Malkmus was singing about, but it fucking worked. This is when Spoon’s first album, Telephono, came out, on Matador. In the early ’90s I started noticing that a lot of the records I liked had this Matador logo on the back: Guided by Voices, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Liz Phair. They were the coolest label. To be able to be in the same company as those people was unreal. So, for a brief time, it was amazing—and then the record came out and nobody cared."