"One of the best blue-eyed soul voices ever. Famously he didn't do drugs in the '60s and made up for it in the '70s. My girlfriend gave me a book about how he recorded each album, it's incredibly detailed. For this record, he got a studio together in New York and got a load of musicians together to make the record. At no point did he play any of the session players any vocals – they heard bits of music but they had no clear picture of what the actual song would be like. He had a total vision and he didn't want to deviate from that with anyone else's opinion. People talk about records that go from jazz to prog to psych to vaudeville in one track and that's Todd. A proper studio head who could write hooks and songs in an almost Brill Building way. My favourite story about Todd is that he lives in Hawaii and one side of his house doesn't have a wall. He said about it, "Lots of things come in. Animals, super-fans, stalkers, the weather."

"My favorite — my number one favorite, actually — is A Woman Under the Influence. [Gena Rowlands] is just… I respect and admire her so much as an actress. I just think that performance is so brave and extraordinary. It was one of those things that, as a woman, as an actress, I kind of appreciate, you know. And also, that film is kind of a really, truly independent film. I think Cassavetes financed it, I think Peter Falk put money into it; kind of no one really believed in it. I was in a film a couple of years ago that a studio would never touch, a movie called Trucker, which was a great opportunity for me; but those sort of movies need to be independently financed."

"A classic, and I grew up loving Judy Garland, and Bert Lahr is an amazing actor. As a child I watched it over and over again. It just represents the magic of moviemaking. I love how it goes from black-and-white to technicolor. My dad was a big Judy Garland fan growing up, so we would hear all these stories about her and the old studio system, so that’s one of my favorites."

"My son Ben went to Elliot School, which is quite famous for producing musicians. The first one that I knew was Kieran Hebden, who makes music as Four Tet. There was a culture at one point that was encouraging people. Ben was in the same class as the xx’s Romy [Madley-Croft] and he knew Jamie [Smith] quite well, and I knew his parents. We even went to their holiday house in Norfolk. The xx were the shy ones, they were like a little gang. Jamie was the most outgoing one, and he was pretty shy. I knew quite a lot about how that record happened, that they tried first with a producer and then did it in a house studio. We were living just down the road from where that was going on."

"They’re not peers, they’re older, but when I came to New York to college I interned at the studio they used to run in Harlem. This first LP came out before I went to college, and it had such a distinct, reverby, warm sound. I love every song. It’s the band I’ve paid most in my life to go see. This LP is one of the best things to come out of New York in 10 years."

"I read a book called The Artist’s Way and it’s for any blocked artist. A year into making the album, I had all this incredible material. It was flowing but it stopped. Going to the studio was too much pressure. One thing the book talked about was, ‘Three pages a day.’ The first thing you do is write three pages freehand nonstop. That’s how I got back to writing. I got notebooks and notebooks full of lyrics."