"As a teenager in the late 70s I wasn't really interested in contemporary pop music or punk-rock, I was listening to stuff from 10 years earlier. This was a big record for me. Sometimes when I'm singing – it occurred to me last night in Istanbul – I realise there's a certain kind of vocalising I do that takes its cue from Leon Russell. He sang in a southern accent but it was very blown-out and exaggerated, very free and loose. I got this record as a gift for playing in the baseball team at junior high – I loathed sports but there weren't enough people to complete the team. So the coach said, have as many records as you want, just please be on the baseball team. I was like, all right I'll do it."

"This song is from one of the Éthiopiques compilations and I really got really into them a few years ago. I was touring around Southern France and Spain and I remember listening to that music for the first time and seeing the beautiful landscape out the window. There’s just so much emotion and feeling in his playing and it really made me want to have saxophone on the record. “It's interesting sometimes with instrumental music, how it can almost make you feel more than a good lyric will make you feel. It provokes something that touches you on an almost spiritual level. I think that's the goal as a musician - whether it's instrumental or it has lyrics, you're always trying to touch someone in a really deep way; you want to try to get at the core of somebody."

"Call it Extreme Southern Gothic, New Orleans division. The protagonists of this dark French Quarter novel are knee-deep in murder, torture, sex and cannibalism. The story is unabashedly grim (or as Brite himself puts it, “twisted, horrific”), but Brite’s prose is crystal clear, and his literate tone is sufficiently wry and ironic that it creates a sort of safety zone in which readers not normally drawn to this sort of stuff (myself included) can take refuge while they read. But even arm’s-length readers are apt to find themselves being drawn further and further into the story—seduced in spite of the themselves. Material that would be merely sick, disgusting, and unreadable in the hands of a lesser writer is, with Brite at the controls, surprisingly erotic and captivating. It’s a tour de force, in a literary category all by itself."

"This one is kind of a rare bird - it’s one that I think rock lovers from the ‘70s and ‘80s will know. It was my Dad’s favourite song and it was his karaoke song. I think I have a video somewhere of him wailing it in a car when I was growing up. He could hit all the notes and I was always in awe of him. My Dad had such a beautiful voice and a big range, and he still does to this day. We’d sing along to it and all do air guitar to the crazy guitar solos. “It brings back childhood memories, but it’s also just a badass rock ‘n’ roll song, and it was my introduction to rock music. I love southern rock and it definitely has an influence on the music I make with DNCE now."

"I love Three Feet High And Rising as well - I could have taken up two slots! De La Soul are just one of my all time favourite groups, and happen to be personal friends of mine as well. Three Feet High... was a more manic album, there were all kind of little bits and pieces of things that I love, and songs like 'Can You Keep A Secret'. But De La Soul Is Dead was a reaffirmation; they were typecast as hippies and they resented that, similar to how the Goodie Mob were typecast as being country - we may have been Southern, but we weren't country. There's something defiant about it. This is when they were concentrated, and not random and manic like Three Feet..., which is great as well - but this is streamlined, but still just as alternative and experimental. And a lot more effective."