"This is from Rock 'n' Roll Animal, which I don’t listen to anymore and haven’t for years. I prefer to listen to - and really enjoy - other versions of ‘Sweet Jane’ much more. This has the big dual-electric guitar thing going on, and a long intro before he comes onstage. You can hear the audience respond after it’s gone on for several minutes and gone through all this sort of classic rock sounding stuff, which I liked a little bit when I first heard it, but now it doesn’t really speak to me. I’m remembering it because he’s coming onstage and the way he starts singing. I think this was first album that I had, or got out of a library, that I was able to listen to a bunch of times. I listened to it a lot of times and I really liked the song. Shortly after that, the brother I stayed with in New York City, who took me to the Johnny Thunders show, had actually been at the concert that they recorded Lou Reed’s Rock 'n' Roll Animal. He and friends were there, they were way in the back. They did two shows, two sets, with two audiences. For the next one they didn’t have all the seats filled in the front, so my brother and his friends got invited to be up front for the second show, so one of those crowd people screaming or yelling could have been him. He was there at the show and that was a little extra or bonus I found out after the fact. Speaking of that, it’s possible that I got a lot of stuff out of a library and kept checking things out, he would give me some albums for Christmas or a birthday, so it’s possible that that one came from him as well - which sort of makes sense if he was there at that concert!"

"Gino Vannelli's albums were what made me feel it was possible to be a songwriter. When I was younger I used to do a lot of production work with my cousin Brian Warfield, we had our own studio. He went on later on to produce artists like Jhené Aiko and Miguel, but before that I feel like I was very much his very first hep artist, his homeboy at least, just making music together. We'd go buy records to sample and then we would work on music and go eat Yoshinoya. I remember my older brother came over, and he picked up Gino Vannelli's album on a fluke. I'd never seen it, I'd never paid attention to it, it was just sitting in the pile of records. My older brother put the first song on to find the sample and the way the record starts out grabbed my attention because of the style progressions that are happening immediately. When he left I put the record on and it washed over me and transformed me. There's songs that when you actually put them on you lose control of yourself almost, and you go into this thing where you start to sing, and all of a sudden you are a singer because this is something that you love so much. And when I would hear Gino Vannelli, I would pay attention to the lyrics, I'd pay attention to what he was singing about; some love loss or some mythology or something weird that a woman that has done to him. This is one of my favourite albums, Gist of the Gemini. Along with Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald, he kind of shaped my songwriting and kind of let me know what it was to write songs. I was always told that you have to be honest in the music, but I was like 'well how do you do that?', and the people that taught me how to do that were Gino Vannelli, Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, with a couple of other people too."