"Fucking loved that record, man. I met Premier and Guru early, before the first album; they were still on Wild Pitch. I was down at their video for Word I Manifest, before Cypress came out, in like ‘89. That was a good time in New York man; I loved New York in the late eighties. It was incredible. The creativity and the culture of the city was so raw. That’s where a lot of subcultures came out of, that rawness. You didn’t see a lot of shit come out of Beverly Hills… there’s a reason for that."

"Wonderful! Brilliant! It’s very different to everybody else, and it’s all men singing who sound like women. It sounds like Jefferson Airplane at times, and you think, “Who’s that woman?” and then you realise it’s a man. And now that singer does TV commercials and plays accordion in coffee shops. They were quite big. In England, quite a lot of people bought their records. We DJ-ed a lot with our original one, and somebody stole it from a club. We’ll find one again! H.P. Lovecraft were really underrated in terms of the sixties bands from the West Coast."

"There might have been personal things in my life right here, because I wanted to strip things down. Another inspiration was a lot of country singer-songwriters. I’m friends with a guy named Terry Allen, who’s a great, very eccentric songwriter. Both of us have worked with Lucinda Williams, who everybody knows is an incredible songwriter. There’s an early group called the Flatlanders, and their first records or demos were just amazing. I was really immersed in these people who were writing very simply, as far as their musical arrangements, and very heartfelt. I was getting a lot of inspiration from them."

"Andy Hull played me this record before it was out in a van when we touring solo together. I read the lyrics and convinced him (over the course of two weeks) that the title HAD to be A Black Mile To The Surface. I also remember really liking the shift in their sound but worrying that it wasn’t going to connect with a lot of people and I was really, really wrong on that front. It’s a record that starts pretty great, but keeps growing and growing on you the more you listen. It gets a lot of spins in our house."

"The Man Who Recorded the World is a biography of Alan Lomax, who's the folklorist in the United States who was the first person to record people like Leadbelly and various other blues artists. He travelled around the South in the Forties with a wax cylinder machine to record these artists who no-one had ever recorded before. It's amazing to read as a producer and engineer, but also as someone who travels a lot and is exposed to a lot of different music. It's by John Szwed, who also did a biography of Miles Davis."