"One of the first records I remember having any kind of relationship to was the soundtrack to 2001. At that point, I wasn’t allowed to put the needle on the record, but my dad would put it on, and, looking back now, I liked it ’cause it it scared me. There’s a lot of spooky stuff on there. I wanted to hear the record that was going to freak me out, and I wanted my dad in the room while it was being played. Growing up in Temple, Texas, my dad was the looser parent, the kind of guy who would wake the kids up in the morning by turning the stereo on really loud and blasting some upbeat music. In fact, the neighbor was always calling over to tell him to turn his stereo down. Later, he became a little more strict and got more religious; now he goes to mass every day. My parents split up in ’79, when I was 8. It was a pretty acrimonious break up. By then, I had a younger brother and sister, and we would go see my dad every other weekend. There was a certain voice my mom reserved only for my dad—when she would pick up the phone and use this voice, I knew it was him: “Oh hello.” There was a lot of animosity there for a long time, but as of the last couple of years, we have all shared Thanksgiving together for the first time since 1978, which has been really nice. My little brother now has a kid, so that brings everybody together."

"I've got some family in Canada, and when I was about 12 we went over for a holiday. When we came back, my cousins had given my brother a load of American music, and that was really the first time that I had heard Smashing Pumpkins. And he'd come back and play these tapes and it was like: ""Wow! Music from America!"" This was the time before the internet, and we didn't have a TV either, so this was all kind of exotic. I remember not really realising that they were playing guitars because it didn't really sound like that. I couldn't tell what it was made of. It sounded like machinery and that it was made of fiddly twiddly weird tones, and obviously with his voice on top of it, I was like, ""What the hell is this?!"" I remember for a year not really liking it, but my brother kept on playing it, and it slowly crept into me. That whole album is so deeply produced that the playing on it, the sound on it, is just fucking awesome. The breadth of different sounds are amazing. Every intro is like a perfect little new world opening up. You always think of Billy Corgan being a total egomaniac locking the other band members out of the studio as the story goes, making Jimmy Chamberlin rehearse for 12 hours a day until the drums were perfect. The end result is this perfect dreamy, shoegaze-y album with a hard core, yet it's also quite gentle as well, which I think is a common theme with all the albums I've chosen."