"Super influential record for the new wave of British heavy metal. Super influential record for Megadeth and Metallica. That was one of those records that everyone should listen to but not a lot of people know about. I think the beauty of it is the simplicity of the British riffing and the general approach to the music. I'm sad to have seen the band fall apart from its classic line-up although I don't know that they were necessarily prepared for greatness, if I can put it that way without being offensive. They were heralded to be the next Led Zeppelin and I get it. But I think internal problems started around when Canterbury came out in 1983."

"Early in our marriage my husband gave me The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin and published by Harvard University Press. What an amazement to see her poems in her own hand, intact in their radical, astonished beauty without the many editorial interventions made after her death which silently “corrected” and altered her grammar, idiosyncratic capitalization, punctuation, and much else. I could even see the alternate word-choices she left on the page—that feeling of the mind in motion. Recently, New Directions published The Gorgeous Nothings, which beautifully reproduces her late envelope writings and includes as well a photo of the small pencil she carried in the pocket of her dress—another book to treasure"

"Carolyn Cassady was the wife of Neal Cassady who is the hero in Kerouac’s “On the Road.” She was his wife, but also an artist and art teacher, and she was linked to this absolute lunatic of a man who was her Achilles heel. He regularly betrayed her, but you love who you love. She had a love affair with Kerouac as well—weirdly because Neal Cassady suggested it. She was an incredibly gifted writer, but she was managing these crazy men in her life and bringing up her children and I guess she didn’t see herself in that way. But she wrote with so much intuition and insight, and a lot of beauty as well."

"This record can adapt to almost anything I'm doing - I listen to it when I cook, when I shower, when hiking, but it's perhaps best for nighttime, I have a cocktail in my hand, and I'm looking over the city lights. It is cocktail music in a way, but very dark. It's a very soothing record, to the ears and the soul. I actually put it in a metal category, even though it's more jazz, because the mood of it is so dark. They're opposites, but it works. In music that I make, even if it's subconsciously, I try to bring together the beauty and the dirtiness of rock. I love the contrast and dynamic of that."