"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."

"The reason I’ve chosen the Donna Summer album is not truly because it is a record I’ve played a lot. There is one song on it that changed my career. It’s a song that changed a lot of people’s perceptions of music and it’s, obviously, ‘I Feel Love’. I remember when I first heard ‘I Feel Love’, it sounded alien. I hadn’t heard anything like that before. There wasn’t anything like that before. Somebody had the forethought and the invention to actually come up with something with electronic sequencing that people could dance to. It pulsated in a different way. That person was Giorgio Moroder. I am very grateful to Giorgio Moroder for inventing this way of thinking and for the other records he’s made. I think he is a terrific talent and I loved the work he did on a lot of movie soundtracks, particularly Midnight Express and Cat People. I have all his work. ‘I Feel Love’ was visionary – that’s all I can say about it. The song, along with The Sparks’ album Moroder did [No. 1 In Heaven], was the sort of sound I wanted to make. I was just learning electronic music and how to sequence things. Without a doubt, between Moroder and Kraftwerk, those were the people leading the way – that paved the streets for me. Without ‘I Feel Love’ there wouldn’t be a lot of electronic dance music. That’s the DNA we all used. Moroder, for me, had a period where he was defining the future and it was very unnoticed by a lot of people, perhaps because he was more of a producer than a writer of a lot of songs. As for I Remember Yesterday, it’s a funny album as half of it is electronic and brilliant and the other half is very traditional and is okay. It’s a strange balance but a very important album because of that track."