"When I was growing up, hip-hop was pretty new. My oldest brother was really into it. Also, we had MTV from about 1990 onwards, so you'd see all these different people - A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy and Gang Starr - just became a soundtrack to whatever we were doing. I picked that one because I love DJ Premier's production, but also Guru's voice. I'm a big fan of the experimentation within hip-hop. Nowadays, people feel hip-hop has gone mainstream or whatever, but at that time, people were making records that were sampling very out there, experimental music, but combining them with parts from classical or jazz recordings, resulting in this very dense collage of sounds that is at times not even very melodic, but it's always got an amazing groove to it. It was those aspects in combination with Guru's voice, I just found it really inventive and exciting. Also, I would listen to it, and want to know where the samples had come from, and then I would go on missions to try and track things down. I think there was a Monk Higgins sample used on the track, 'Code Of The Streets', and that's just very alien-sounding. It's very basic, but it uses this beautiful violin part all the way through the track. They must have just been listening to such a wide variety of music, and what they've come out with is much more interesting that what came out post that era of hip-hop. You get some songs where there's a whole song taken, with just new lyrics added on. Back then though, there would have been as many as forty songs sampled in one song sometimes."

"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."