"There's a reason that I left this one for last. I put it in this position because it seemed like the natural conclusion to this collection of songs. It's the climax, it's the one that gathers everything up and then sums everything up emotionally. It's the finale - everything's building up to this moment. There's centuries of pain, tragedy and - again - loss in his voice, it's undeniable. “The lyrics are based around one extremely simple metaphor, but so much that's good in art, whether we're talking about visual art or songwriting or performance art or literature or poetry, so much that's truly powerful takes one easily understood idea and then brings depth to it. That's what's happening here - it's a metaphor that you instantly understand. It's like looking at a Picasso painting; you're immediately struck by the image, but there's so much more going on beneath the surface. You can listen to it hundreds of times and not feel as if you've exhausted its emotional content. “We were talking about Trish Keenan earlier, but she seems like one of the exceptions to the rule I subscribe to, which is that you should be able to understand everything purely from the performance and the lyrics. You shouldn't need to know anything about the artist's personal life. Paul Robeson was this gargantuan figure of the twentieth century; there was that intelligence, integrity and, for the most part, nobility to him, going as he did from singer to actor to petitioning the President of the United States, but you wouldn't even have to know the slightest thing about him, and you'd still have that instant reaction to this song; there's so much emotional power to it. “I don't know how I'd deal with life if I didn't have music like this - to help me go through it, and to help me understand it.”"

"My Father introduced me to this, he was very passionate about culture, literature and music, especially jazz and classical music and he would take me to see it. I lived in L.A. and on the long drives home he’d put on whatever music he was interested in at the time and was always really passionate about it. “I was a classical and jazz nerd when I was a kid, that’s what was around me and what I was learning about. My older brother started learning the guitar when I was about ten and I started then too, I got really serious about it and he sort of stopped. “I’m of a generation where we really listened to records as records, I’d go extremely deep with symphonies and jazz records and this one was really major. It’s a piece of music that’s stuck with me since I was fourteen years old, it’s the harmonic sensibility in it, the drama and the way it paints this very intense, almost kind of landscape picture. There’s a mid-20th Century sense of harmony to it that’s stuck with me and I’ve continued revisiting it and referencing it in my mind as an example of really rich, really emotive writing, without any words whatsoever. “It was my first experience of a deeply technical piece of music that was deeply emotional and accessed your emotional brain in a really intense and overwhelming way. That’s always been the goal, not to make music that’s cerebral, but to use your technical ability to channel something that hits your emotional brain and takes your entire brain over in almost a trance-like experience. “This was the first piece of music that I heard that had that level of complexity, but it was still as affecting as a Beatles record."