"I forget quite which year this album came out [2004], but it was an astonishing time for new music. There were wonderful albums by Martha Wainwright, Antony And The Johnsons and Arcade Fire. Micah P. Hinson's record was another – it was so simple. It didn't really have choruses or verses – he had a thing which I call a 'ver-chorus', which is something in between the two. It was totally memorable and his words never fail to hit the mark. The simplicity means that the album depends very strongly on the arrangement and they are impeccable. They remind me of Leonard Cohen in some ways. He has a wonderfully deep voice. He seems to have gone through some kind of hell. I am not quite sure what it was – he made reference to it when I saw him play a show. Every single lyric hits home to me. Some of them sound a bit like homilies to me, but the way he sings them makes you believe him. There is not a dud track and I still listen to it, to this day. I have tried many of his later songs, but this is the record if you want an introduction to Micah P. Hinson. It's a great record. When you asked for the list, I could have chosen bands that meant more to me – I didn't choose a record by The Doors – and I could have easily included Martha Wainwright's debut, but in the end I had to be honest with myself and come back to the records I cannot stop playing. This is one of them. It was a toss-up between Martha and Micah, and I went for Micah in the end."

"Well, that was another one I burned on my way. At first, I was into the earlier John Coltrane, and then when he went into more free jazz, at first I didn't like it as much because I was so into his early tone and the swing and the melody of this more classic jazz, but the next one's more like that. Jesse [Trbovich, bandmate in the Violators] turned me on to it. We got stuck on the way home from an LA show or somewhere, we got dumped off in Phoenix, Arizona, and we had to stay for the night. We knew a really good record store there, Revolver Records, there was just a ton of jazz. I was wanting to stock up so I got Interstellar Space as a recommendation. When I first listened, I was like, [shrugs] yeah, 'cause he's just freaking out, just him and a drummer, Rashied Ali, then I burned it anyway. Usually what happens is that it sounds so good 'cause it's burned from those original vinyls and then you crank it in your headphones and it just sounds unreal, so that's what happened with that one on the way to Joshua Tree. My mind was blown and it's just so open and such raw emotion and so psychedelic without any of the pretensions that 'psychedelic' eventually became - he's just the real thing. It's just wide open and sprawling. 'Lost My Head' for sure has that jazz influence... obviously it's a white man's, with limited skill. The convenience of the key of C, for instance - you play all those sevenths with the same formation all over the place, so that's why the piano's beautiful, but that's got the McCoy Tyner or whatever thing in it."