"I first started listening to The Slits when I was about 8, with my friend Antonia, and we stole all her brother's Slits records and used to dance around the room pretending we were the Slits. I just picked this because I'm sure it was a huge part of my life. If I could have been any kind of singer, I would have been a punk - I thought I was a little punk growing up! I wanted to be in The Slits, I wanted to be that kind of a woman, but I grew up to be a folk singer, and that's alright too - I like that. It's just the attitude - I hear The Slits and I'm immediately back in that time. It was a one-off period, it was an exciting time and they kind of encapsulated a sense of anarchic joy. The songs are fucking fantastic as well. There's that ska element, punk, reggae and they're British and they're fantastic. I don't know if there's ever been anyone like them since."

"This song has this kind of rocksteady beat over a little bit of a punk rock thing, but I could relate to it because it still sounded like folk music. It wasn’t over the top like the Sex Pistols, it was music from the street and for the people and it had a heartbeat. Joe was explaining the situation in the song much like Bob too, and something in my head just clicked where I was like, ‘This is the same.’ That sent me even further on my musical course. “When I first heard Joe and Mick [Jones, lead guitarist in The Clash] get together and play those beats with the simple guitar stabs, I knew that all I cared about was lyrics. I didn’t care about the music or playing technical. Of course, I was only 13 years old and now I care much more about that, but at this point I just wanted to communicate my message and The Clash showed me the way. After that I got even deeper into storytelling punk rock music."

"You have to put Hendrix in there if we’re doing this properly. Why Axis I don’t know, but I remember I had a copy of that record without a cover as a kid so I made a cover for it. It was some religious record sleeve - there were all these new folk bands playing at churches in the early seventies - but there was no record in the sleeve and I fancied myself as a drawer so I took a magic marker and put the album title and drew my version of Hendrix playing the guitar. It was one of the earliest records I listened to – I’m from Seattle and everyone in Seattle has a Hendrix record or five. I thought I was being a little bit different going for Axis as a nine or ten year-old kid, 'cos it wasn’t one of the main records, it didn’t have any of the hits on it. It was kinda dark and twisted and cool. I think it stands the test of time musically."

"I’ve seen the Herzog one a good many times too, but the Murnau film… Murnau is neck to neck with Bergman as my favorite director. He’s responsible for some of the best images in cinema of all time, from Nosferatu to Faust to Sunset. His work was so influential that filmmakers generations later can be referencing Murnau without knowing it. But Nosferatu is an interesting movie. It was produced by Albin Grau, an occultist who started an independent film studio to make occult-themed movies. Nosferatu was his first endeavor. And he hired the screenwriter, and he hired Murnau, and he was the production designer and did a lot of concept art. Very much part of the authorship of this film. And Max Schreck, as much as he is a folk vampire and a reinterpretation of Stoker’s literary gothic vampire, he’s also influenced by Albin Grau’s early 20th-century occultist views on vampirism. But in many ways — there’s horror movies before it, obviously — Nosferatu invents horror movies. The editing of the parallel story together in some ways invents cinema."

"I was aware of Bill Callahan through Smog and that, but I think these latest records that he's done are amazing. They're quite abstract in a way, it's really quite something, the lyrics are really good but the music is also really imaginative and the song structures are quite weird. He definitely doesn't stick to the pop song structure that I was talking about earlier on, but it is melodic, it's not atonal or anything. His records have a natural, very close sound, but it isn't straight folk or anything like that, the instruments are acoustic but then he goes off into these different realms. I think the latest record, that I'm just trying to get my head around at the moment, continues that. He's really thought of it as an album, it's a double and it's split up into four sides, and I know that when he was letting people know about it they released a side at a time, so it's conceived as those four or five songs sitting together as a suite. It's the best record I've heard in ages."