"Violent Femmes was a huge high-school record. I probably got it when I was 14 or 15. I just played the entire album on stage with [Femmes bassist] Brian Ritchie, Brian from the Dresden Dolls and [Bad Seed] Mick Harvey, so I found myself revisiting the record and my early experiences of it. The one thing I remembered was that when I heard that record for the first time, I thought Gordon Gano was a girl. But really sexy! The songs were so sexy and raw and filled with beautiful, actually relatable teenage angst. The music and the production was all so immediate. My cool friends and my older brother were all listening to punk. I tried to be cool and tried to like the Sex Pistols, but I just couldn't get into the records. There just wasn't enough song there for me. But the Violent Femmes was like punk music that my brain could actually follow. I played that tape into the ground, just a non-stop soundtrack. Another thing I realised revisiting it was there's just not a bad song on that record, not a single moment that isn't essential. There's not two seconds of filler."

"This record convinced me that no matter what anyone said about making music as a career that I had to try. I didn’t know if I’d “make it” or if I will yet, but I knew that when I heard this record I had to try. I’ve always heard Born to Run in my mother’s car, but it wasn’t until my late teenage years and early twenties that I understood what was being said here. To me, this was my ticket out. Born to Run gave me the permission to leave everything sensible and practical behind and go for my own dreams. It still makes me pause when I hear those piano intros on ""Thunder Road"" and ""Backstreets."" In the same way Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. spoke to me as a teenager, this record spoke to the guy in his twenties who really wasn’t very good at much, except maybe music, and that was a big maybe. It also comforted me in times of great heartache and self doubt. This is an encouraging record. It’s a masterpiece. I would take this record over almost any other “classic” album by any artist."