"I think I heard Värttinä first on an album of so-called world music that EMI put out on a label it owned at the time of this record [1994]. They sent me some tracks and opened me up a little bit to Scandinavian folk music - some great stuff from Sweden and Finland that I was very enthused to hear. Although I speak not a word of Finnish and I have no idea what these Finnish fishwives, as I call them, are singing about, we want to immerse ourselves in some notion of what the words mean. It’s just in the same way I don’t speak Hindu or any other Indian language, but love Indian music. Curiously, the marriage between Indian music and Finnish music occurred officially a few years ago when AR Rahman, the great Indian contemporary composer and arranger, discovered Värttinä too and did an album where he used Värttinä’s voices singing in Finnish in some of his sophisticated Bollywood music. He, like me, had fallen under the spell of these fishwives, although I’m sure he too speaks not a word of Finnish. So it’s something about the sound of the words, how the sounds are enunciated, that lets the imagination roam free, unconstricted by what might turn out to be the awful truth, that it’s yet another boring love song."

"I didn’t want to have a theme in the records I picked. It’s a record I’ve listened to a lot lately. One of my children is 7 years old and he’s been learning a lot about Greek history recently and picking up tidbits of information. He was saying to me that he really wanted to hear some Greek music. This is not what he wanted to hear. He wanted to hear some folk music, not some weird shit. He wanted: ‘Ops la! Da da da da!’ Some cheery Greek dance music. I stumbled onto this. I asked him if he wanted Greek or ancient Greek and he said ‘ancient’ because it sounded cool. But this is incredibly trippy. It feels like a play. You don’t know where the down beat is for most of the songs. I have never figured out what about it is actually Greek. It was recorded by Spaniards in the 70s. Whether it's real or impressionistic, I don’t care. I just really like it. There’s a lot of haunting stuff in it. I’ll have the record on late at night when everyone else has gone to bed. It’ll be playing and you’ll hear the voice speaking Greek and squeals. I’ve really grown to love it and know certain pieces. I know they have made other records and I want to get them"