"This was a song that I'd hear on the radio quite a bit when I was growing up. It wasn't a current song, but it was one of those that had legs, and they just kept on playing it. ""The reason it was on my mind is because I pulled it apart the other day. I do that when I'm trying to get into work mode. I might have been hanging with friends, or dealing with business or talking to my mom, so when I want to switch over to the kind of mindset where I need to be receptive to musical ideas, it sometimes helps me to just play a song that I really love - not one of my own - and pick at it. What are the chords doing here? I'm asking that kind of question. ""I heard the Fugees version - which is what brought it to mind - but the Flack one is my favourite. To get to that place in my head when I'm working, I need to do something physical, like sing and strum the guitar on a track that's not mine and just figure out what makes it tick. So in terms of 'Killing Me Softly', there's this cool trick - this cycle of fifths - where you play a chord, and then go a fifth up, and then another fifth up, and it sounds as if it's going down at the same time. You don't hear that very often, but it's on songs like 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road' and 'You Never Give Me Your Money'. ""At first glance, you might say this is a sad song, because of the tone and approach, but it's not. It's just somewhere to go if you're looking for an emotional experience, because it's pure soul"

" Oswald is probably best known for her last book, “Memorial,” an extraordinarily free reinterpretation of the Iliad. (At public readings of “Memorial,” she recites it from memory, in homage to the orality of the original. I was lucky enough to witness this in London. The effect is rhapsodic, spellbinding.) Oswald does indeed have a classical power: she’s at once a grand elegist and a close celebrant of life, a rhetorician and a playful contemporary—a writer who can describe Hector dying in battle but can also depict how he “used to nip home deafened by weapons / To stand in full armour by the doorway / Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running.” At the heart of her new book is a long poem titled “Tithonus,” after one of Eos’s lovers from Greek mythology. It is a minutely detailed, ravishing, and rapturously observant account of the English countryside waking up at dawn—what Oswald calls “46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn.” Slowly, the light builds and the stars disappear and the woods awaken to the birds: “as soon as dawn one star then / suddenly none then blue then pale / and the whole apparition only / ever known backwards already too / late now almost gone.” I’m sometimes reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edward Thomas, but the tutelary spirit seems to be Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” and that novel’s patient italicized passages (written from the point of view of the author) about sunlight building and spreading across the English landscape. (“The day waves yellow with all its crops” is one of my very favorite sentences from Woolf’s novel, and one that Oswald might easily have written herself.) This poet is, for me, a perpetual inspiration."

"It's an unstoppable record. I nicked my copy so I never had a sleeve for it, so I never got any of the song titles or anything like that. But again it's a very complete record. It's one of the few albums that I can just leave on and it can play all the way through and you don't go oh, not this track again, I hate this song. Everything on it sounds like it was recorded in somebody's bedroom. I've never even looked up how they actually did do it, but I just love that the machines and the loops they used were pretty much standard for the dance crowd, and things like where I would have said oh, not that beat again, everybody's heard that loop, you know, actually they turned round and said ah, but if we do it like this it sounds really good. And the production on it is amazing. Some of the things that are going on with the timings on the compressors and the noise gates, on that level there's plenty to listen to, as well as the songs being great. The dynamics and the editing in and out and the mixes are really quite something else. I wonder sometimes if it's only because I've made records myself that I get how much work must've gone into that to make it happen. But at the same time it still sounds like it was done in a bedroom. But again, they're very minimalist in what they use. They pick their shots. When they do something they make sure it's in the right way and in the right place. There's nothing in there that clouds the water or gets in the way of the vocals or loses the bass. It's always relevant."

"This is hard — to choose five — because there are a few in this genre that I really like, so I don’t know which one to pick. This is sort of going to be [from] an underworld, mobster kind of [genre]. So it’s either The Godfather II, even though I like all The Godfathers — I even like Godfather III; it’s just a different type of movie. But it’s between Godfather II and then also, there’s a movie that I did, and it’s not just because I’m in it — I love it — but it’s a movie called Paid in Full which happened to be a true story about these three drug dealers in the eighties who really made it big, and all this downfall happens. So I would have to put a couple of those in the fifth category. I would say Paid in Full, Godfather II — when Michael [Al Pacino] really grabbed the reins — and Goodfellas. And Casino — I was going to pick two of them, but I’m not. I would say Casino to me — I hated how Sam Rothstein got manipulated by Sharon Stone’s character in Casino. I mean, I just hate how he gets manipulated; that just gets ridiculous to me. I know it’s historic, but I hated that. So those are the three that I would put in as my fifth, in the genre of the underworld. The top of that list, I gotta go with Francis Coppola, Godfather II. Just for the epicness of it. And usually sometimes movies are long for no reason, but it was long for the right reasons, which is very rare. Usually, you’re like, “You could cut out twenty minutes of that,” but for me it was all story. To me, if I had to choose, I’d go with the classic Godfather II."

"I never knew if this was a compilation album or not, but it was the one that was around when I was at school. All of my mates had this record. 'Sunshine Of Your Love' and 'Crossroads' are my two favourite cuts off the album, but the thing was although as a band they were gifted with tons of ability they were also very musical with their recordings. One of the things they got, which I don't think a lot of the other bands did, was that it's great to jam for an hour live, but a record is a repeated instant. When you make an album it's something that people listen to over and over. So I think there were two Creams. There was the one that recorded and did songs that were four minutes long like 'Badge' and things, and then in something like 'Crossroads' they kind of just kept the best bits. I think they got it right. It's very difficult to be inspired and to be inspirational to your other players without it having to be a long-winded routine to get there. And alongside all that was that track 'A Mother Was Washing Her Baby one Night' which was brilliant ['Mother's Lament' from Disraeli Gears]. When I heard that it made it okay to have a sense of humour sometimes and to not take yourself too seriously. For me that last three minutes on the album probably had more of a message than a lot of the rest of it did, because it resonated that yeah, you can do something that's fun. You can do something that's funny, because actually we're pretty good at the rest of it already."

"With the compilation albums, I am cheating. It meant I didn't know which album to choose. I sometimes DJ. When I DJ, I use a system to take people into an ecstatic trance through music. I might start with Brian Eno and some ambient music and then move to other genres. I might use classical music or Indian music. But, invariably, when I get to the third rhythm of trance and when I really want to take people into that state, I am almost forced to go to Underworld again and again. Underworld brought together song and dance in a way that I have not heard anyone match. The Chemical Brothers are great and New Order are obviously great, but Underworld take me to a tribal edge that is so ferocious and yet, simultaneously, so intelligent. 'Rez' is one of my favourite songs – even though that is not one of their most tribal. 'Moaner' and 'Born Slippy' are their more tribal tunes. I find their textures and landscapes and vocals – which don't get in the way and help you lose yourself when you are dancing – make Underworld difficult to surpass. I was so proud of them when they got to do the Olympics in 2012. I felt that was their due. I contacted them before the Olympics and had a lovely communication with them. I told them that I thought they were the most revolutionary and iconoclastic band of the last 20 years. Then, about a year later, Danny Boyle used them during the opening ceremony. I saw them play recently at the Hollywood Bowl and I danced so much that I badly twisted my ankle and couldn't walk for about two weeks. It was still worth it. Dancing injuries are to be worn like medals of honour."

"Pixies are my favourite band, I've definitely listened to them more than any other band. It was hard to pick a song, I ended up just closing my eyes and pointing because I didn't really know which one to pick. With Pixies I feel there's just so much there; all the stopping and starting and the screaming and Kim Deal - Kim Deal's voice and Kim Deal's basslines - and all the weird timings, the freaky lyrics that don't make any sense and the loud and quietness of how they play. They've been a really huge inspiration to me. When I listen to Pixies I feel like music can be anything, it made me stop worrying what a song is gonna turn into. Before The Big Moon I always used to try and write songs and I never really got anywhere. I used to listen to music that was more polished and finished and I'd compare my music to that and just feel like ""Ugh! I'm never gonna be as good as them."" But Pixies sound so free and wild. They prove that music can go anywhere and if you feel like turning around and playing a different timing and completely different music suddenly, you can just do that. I love how surprising their music is. All four of them have their own brilliant thing going on: the drums are really cool and sometimes jazzy, Joey Santiago’s guitar lines are amazing, he's also got that ugly, gnarly guitar thing going on that I love – loads of bending, clashy notes. And Frank Black as well! No one screams like that. I think they're all amazing but I guess Kim Deal has a special place in my heart because there's just something about her, she's so fucking cool. Her voice doesn't sound like anyone else's, it's so pure and so smooth, she's a huge inspiration."