"Raspberry Beret', 'Paisley Park' and the title track was amazing as well. It's a great psychedelic cover, I guess a bit like Sgt. Pepper's…. I love the flute intro on the title track and that was a big goal for the musical - to have each song have this little virtuosic moment, whether it was a harmonised guitar solo or a little flute line or some kind of piano solo. We had a rule that you had to be able to air-play some instrument on any song and if you could do that you could still be excited listening to the album 20 years down the line. It's hard doing fully contemporary music like Yeasayer, where doing something like a guitar solo always seems like a little dated or cheesy - so you want to have that variety, like a saxophone that's going through a weird pedal or being chopped up by a sampler or something, but this was pure "let's get this trumpet solo to be really haunting"."

"Me and Stevie have a really good relationship. He’s just a music making machine, he doesn’t stop. Anything he does is good. He’s got the magic ears. He’s the line from Elvis and Roy Orbison and The Beatles to the present day. His musical pedigree is the best. His dad was the bassist for Roy Orbison and he grew up with Jim Reeves around. He grew up as the son of the most badass bass player who was playing with all the big hitters. He has the most solid-roots rock pedigree, and he’s an appreciator of music. Him and his dad disagreed about stuff because the British Invasion hadn’t really hit Nashville. They thought British people were weird, funny people. Stevie was beyond that. Not only was he into The Beatles, he was into The Mothers of Invention. The freakiest most degenerate shit ever. Stevie appreciates really freaky shit. With his sounds and development and process of recording, you get a real glimpse into a different era, that’s the magic with him."

"This song has this kind of rocksteady beat over a little bit of a punk rock thing, but I could relate to it because it still sounded like folk music. It wasn’t over the top like the Sex Pistols, it was music from the street and for the people and it had a heartbeat. Joe was explaining the situation in the song much like Bob too, and something in my head just clicked where I was like, ‘This is the same.’ That sent me even further on my musical course. “When I first heard Joe and Mick [Jones, lead guitarist in The Clash] get together and play those beats with the simple guitar stabs, I knew that all I cared about was lyrics. I didn’t care about the music or playing technical. Of course, I was only 13 years old and now I care much more about that, but at this point I just wanted to communicate my message and The Clash showed me the way. After that I got even deeper into storytelling punk rock music."

"‘The Last Splash’ and Pod are great, but Kim Deal is so consistent. There is no problematic or lesser period of her work. Mountain Battles, All Nerve and Pacer are all detailed and precise works, as is ‘Title TK’. Kim has such an unlikely musical thought-path when laying out chord progressions. They never go where you expect, but neither do they sound like the obtuse compositions by songwriter’s songwriters or the wilfully madcap. You just spend a while and settle into Kim’s way of hearing things and then everything is as it should be. I love hearing Deal talk about how she makes and plays music. She has got such straightforward and set ideas, which could fool you into thinking she has a simplistic approach, but it's all about focus. She just knows how to make Breeders’ records. Everything is so intentional. There is one synthesiser note on this record, only one, but it’s there for a reason. Kim Deal has been in no other band of note."

"My older sister was obsessed with this record and played it to death. I had a guitar and was in the middle of struggling my way through Iron Maiden tab books. I figured out that I could work out the chords on the Counting Crows records by a process of trial and error. I did that mainly to please my sister. We had a guitar at home, and you can’t really sit around the campfire playing Megadeth songs. So I started playing Counting Crows We had a guitar at home, and you can’t really sit around the campfire playing Megadeth songs. So I started playing Counting Crows. In the process, I got into it. Looking back now, I think it’s one of the most important records in my own musical development. It taught me pretty much everything I know about songwriting, song structuring and arrangement. I vaguely know Adam [Duritz, vocals], and he was wearing one of my t-shirts at a gig the other day. That was my life coming full circle right there."

"This wasn’t my introduction to folk music by any means, but it was my introduction to Irish folk music that wasn’t merely The Dubliners or The Chieftains. It was Irish music that had a bit of balls and a bit of a wayward quality that came I think from those guys knowing about rock music and, generally speaking, what was going on in the UK. You could call them the first progressive folk band. They had a good way of bringing together bits of tradition, mostly Irish traditional music, with an awareness in terms of arrangements that could only come from a knowledge of other musical forms. And of course they feature what was a growing, new instrument, a non-indigenous instrument of Irish music: the bouzouki. Not the bowl-shaped Greek bouzouki but the flat-backed bouzouki that was being made by luthiers in Britain and Ireland as a more convenient, big boy’s mandolin. The bouzouki became an important part of Irish folk music and Planxty used it to great effect."

"This song that I'm going to play you is really interesting. To me it's the birth of funk guitar. This is a song called 'Go Where I Send Thee' and was recorded in 1937. The Golden Gate Quartet are an a capella group, so this is a capella, but listen to what happens with the rhythm. It's an amazing thing that four guys, no overdubs or anything like that, could make this amount of rhythm. For me they were one of the most important musical forces of the 20th century. The style of singing, which is called jubilee singing, was all originated in this one town in Virginia and there were lots and lots of groups in that town that could do this way of singing. Partly a way of harmonising but it's also a way of creating rhythm by making voices slightly hit off each other so they don't all land together. It's incredibly hard to do. You're pushing the beat by a 16th or 32nd to get that flam."