"She takes that song 'Ain't Got No, I Got Life' and makes it so much more than a silly musical song [from Hair], she gives it emotional depth. That's the great thing about Nina Simone - she did so many Bee Gees songs - and the Bee Gees are this agreed-upon joke. I think the Bee Gees are amazing geniuses - they are just so prolific and the fact that they were able to make all these changes and keep going. They did this Beatles-esque psychedelic thing which I think is awesome and went onto becoming the kings of disco, and wrote that Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton song, 'Islands In The Stream'. Nina Simone hears a Bee Gees song or someone suggests it to her and she goes, ""That's such a sweet song - those guys have no soul at all, but I'm gonna make this song sound awesome."" What I love about that album is that it's mostly all recorded live - there's real space to it because of that. That's something we tried to do for the musical - record it live, we wanted to record it in the same room, but because there were so many elements we had to put in it was impossible. The album was recorded four days after Martin Luther King's death. I don't know how big Nina Simone really was in her lifetime, but it feels like we are lacking in politicised chanteuses right now. I think now [there's] this real era of Christian rock - people just want to be uplifted. It's kind of that dynamic thing that the critic criticises Cat Stevens for; you can probably criticise Coldplay or Mumford & Sons for the same kind of thing. Like, ""Oh you're just toying with me, you're starting all small and then making it huge, of course I have a religious feeling right now!""

"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."

"I thought I don't like it as much as the one I mentioned before, and maybe I still don't, but then once I heard it in the 'phones again, there's something. Then I was listening to that one a lot in the car when I was driving around LA. It just opens your mind. It's undeniable music, untouchable music. Those three people, you just can't really touch them. If you were supposed to pick the greatest musician in the world, I suppose I would have to say John Coltrane. But they're all lumped together because obviously Alice Coltrane does things that John Coltrane can't; same with Pharoah Sanders, it's an extension of John Coltrane. They were put on this planet, they were special beings. I'd appreciated jazz since high school, I played in the jazz band. Then I got some jazz records and enjoyed them, for sure. Growing up, I think the Miles Davis later records hit me first, when I was a late teen, early twenties, Bitches Brew, the classics like Kind Of Blue, and then someone in Boston that I knew turned me on to In A Silent Way, which I really like, it had that Fender Rhodes on it and Chick Corea. But then I read the Miles Davis autobiography, circa 2004: that's like a lesson in jazz in a way, in his cocky way; he saw it all. I remember when I was in Boston, I bought this Thelonius Monk record, Underground, and there's a scatty song on there called 'In Walked Bud' and that always blew my mind. I got heavy back into jazz, and then back into Coltrane circa 2005, 06, 07, I just had some resurgence recently."

"I had an English teacher in high school. You know how every high school has a super hip teacher? Mine was this guy named Leonard Krill. I had been a big fan of David Bowie, and I think Talking Heads had just put out Remain In Light, and of course I knew Brian Eno because he he worked with Bowie and produced Talking Heads and Roxy Music. My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts came out and I couldn't afford to buy it, but Leonard Krill loaned it to me so I could tape it. It was again one of those records that I didn't fully understand, because all the vocals come from these weird, disparate sources. I kind of thought because I was listening to a David Byrne and Brian Eno record I would hear David Byrne and Brian Eno's vocals, that it'd sound like one of the records they'd made. On the first listen I didn't quite get it, but after that it became one of my favourite records. In 1999 when I put out the album Play, I was doing some interviews and people were asking where did I get the idea of putting other people's old vocals onto rhythmic music, and I said 'it all started with My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Without that album I would never ever have had the idea to sample old vocals and put them on my tracks'. It was a direct inspiration - in a really simple way I was copying my heroes. I can't think of any person who has affected modern music more than Brian Eno. If you invented a fictional character like Brian Eno it'd be almost unbelievable."

"I grew up with a lot of my dad's reggae records. I used to always buy the compilations, the Reggae Hits volumes, Ragga Ragga Ragga! We always listened to music in the car and “Murder She Wrote” really captured everything that was great about ‘90s dancehall music. The melodies were right, the emceeing was just the right tone, and the beat itself was of an era of dancehall that I loved so much, from listening to sound systems like Kilimanjaro and Addis. “What I've really enjoyed, having been in this for a minute now, is to see how styles and trends and music are cyclical. I used to think all that was BS; “Oh yeah, don't worry, this is gonna come back round”, but when I start to think, I guess it was around 2015 that there was this new sound everyone was talking about called 'Afrobeats'. I was like “Let's check this out” and to me it's ‘90s dancehall with a twist. You know what I mean? And now we've got Diadora, Kappa, Fila, all these brands that kind of had a moment, and all of a sudden it's retro, it's vintage. It's like “Wow, this is happening in front of my face.” “So to have that wisdom of what those songs were about is exciting for me. I can go in the studio and I can draw samples from a ‘90s dancehall tune, that, if you didn't grow up during that time might be lost in the vaults, because you wouldn't even know about Jigsy King, Sanchez, Beres Hammond and old school dub reggae. “Now I can pull out my tracksuit and people are like 'Mate, where'd you get that?' and I'm like '1990', this is real vintage coming out my mum's cupboard."