"Lots of metal bands had all got a little bit in a rut by the time this came out. People were quite bothered about how they looked. And NIrvana smashed it to pieces. They said music should be raw and powerful – great guitar riffs, good lyrics, great melodies. Nirvana were the ones. And Kurt Cobain was charismatic. A lot of musicians resented grunge, but I quite liked it – we needed it. Saxon never went grunge – we went more metal again in the 90s. We had really needed a rest, but we couldn’t have one, and we weren’t firing on all cylinders. It wasn’t ‘til the 90s that we got our shit together again. Nirvana resonates for me because of that. It took people by surprise, because it went so big so quickly. There’s a lot of menace and darkness in and it was heavier than what other people were doing at the time."

"Greg Sage had a lot of great records right around this period but this one to me is the peak. It's extremely dark music and it's sort of hardcore but it's also undeniable pop songs. I remember driving around Austin with some of my hardcore friends from Temple and they were really into The Misfits, The Dead Kennedys. They weren't into my silly pop music, let me just put it that way. They were not Julian Cope fans. They put this record on they were like 'this is too gloomy. It's creeping me out.' It's a record that has classic song after classic song. At one point I covered 'No One Wants an Alien' just on my four track. I used to cover songs a lot just as an exercise because it was fun and to figure out how songs were put together. It was my process for figuring out how to become a recording artist. "