"Texan singer-novelist Nanci Griffith doesn't compromise with her audience. I once heard her reverse-heckle a fan shouting out requests, retorting in her Tweety-Bird voice, "I don't come to where you work and yell at you!" Like all her first several albums this one is lyrics-heavy, with folk-country accompaniment (Dobros, lap steel, Bela Fleck's banjo), and the stories take precedence over the genre, to the point where she actually criticises country. The black housewife narrating 'Mary & Omie' reports "And I thank my Omie for taking me out of the South." Take that, Stephen Foster! Like the very different Mother Fist, this 1986 album is dedicated to Truman Capote (among others), and every song is a story song, full of car-jumping daredevils, lovelorn young widows, and of course touring musicians bored in buses, staring out into the endless falling snow. "

"Again, I've gone for the "pop" album - I've gone for the greatest hit. I thought about all his records and the minimalist composers, and I could have gone for a Terry Riley record or whatever, but there's a reason this is his hit. I could come back and listen to this any time. One of the greatest live music experiences of my life was when Steve Reich had his 70th birthday at the Barbican, and he came over with his musicians and did nearly all of his classic pieces. I saw Drumming and other stuff, and then I saw this at a little church across the street from the Barbican and it's so beautiful, so gorgeous. Really, really moving. Having said that, this year Kieran and I booked a trip of DJ gigs because we hadn't seen each other in a while, and we played the Snowbombing festival in Austria, which was hilarious. We were driving around, so we hired my friend who's this really placid Czech guy. He's the driver on all my tours and I've never seen him get agitated about anything ever. Most people who drive primarily for a living are prone to road rage, but I've never seen him lose it. So he asked us if we wanted to put on any music so on went Music For 18 Musicians. He's not really a music fan - if you put on Albert Ayler he'd be like, "Jesus Christ, what are you trying to do to me here?!" So we were driving through the Alps, I was chatting to him and Kieran and listening to this piece of music that I love. I didn't really notice but he'd gone silent and 40 minutes in he was like, "Um, excuse me, this music's driving me insane, can we please turn it off?" To me it's the opposite of that, it's the most soothing music possible, so I guess that illustrates that it's not for everyone."

"Beefheart was a bit of a dangerous guy. I did know Don Van Vliet quite well during 1972/73 and he was not a very nice man. He was pretty cruel to his musicians, which was pretty hard for them to take because they didn’t have a great opinion of him as a human being, nor as a musician. Don had no musical talent whatsoever, he simply employed other people to translate his maniacal ravings, musically speaking, into something that had a bit of order and discipline. Lyrically, however, Don did have a great talent and was a vivid painter – literally of course as a pictorial artist in that kind of abstract expressionist style. But he also employed that abstract expressionism in his lyric writing, and that makes him special and very worthwhile in spite of the fact he didn’t leave behind him a group of happy or respectful musicians. It’s rather sad that he was a bully. So he and Frank Zappa are my two big American, not influences, but revered examples of musical greatness. In Beefheart’s case it was a musically naïve greatness. Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot were the two albums around 1972, when Captain Beefheart and his band supported Jethro Tull when we were doing Thick As A Brick in America. Don called me himself, as Warner Brothers had told him what hotel I was staying in, and he kind of invited himself on tour. I tried to talk him out of it saying, “Don, this is not the passport to success you might think it is,” as audiences can be very cruel to support bands. But he was very insistent and Warner Brothers were desperate for some kind of outlet for Beefheart’s work and pushed for him to come on tour with us, so somewhat reluctantly I agreed. The audience did hate him and he got a rough ride every night. It was not successful for him in any way whatsoever. It was a misguided but interesting liaison."

"My dad’s Greek and he came to Britain when he was nine or ten. Like a lot of people, he used music to maintain his identity and when I was a kid, he used to play a lot of the stuff that he brought with him - everything from contemporary rock to older folk and then Yannis Markopoulos as well. He’s one of Greece’s foremost composers. He’s from Crete and he sort of interpolates melodies and rhythms in a way that’s thousands of years old really. “This particular song has a real resonance for me, because it’s probably the first piece of music I can remember the experience of listening to. My dad used to put it on when I was two or three years old and he’d put me on his shoulders and spin me around. It’s incredibly hypnotic and repetitive and I remember this amazing sensation of the first time I had that feeling of music moving me beyond the state of resting existence. It’s stuck with me and I can still put it on and get chills from it - partly because it’s a very powerful piece of music anyway, and partly because it has that incredible memory attached for me as well. “Greek music is still a big part of my life. A few years ago I was involved in this performance at the Barbican where various musicians got together to perform the music and tell the story of another Greek composer, Markos Vamvakaris, and I was the narrator. I joined the rest of the musicians to sing with them at the end of the show and it was a great moment for me. When you’re a generation removed it’s tougher to stay in touch with your national identity, you have to put a little bit more effort in to appreciate your history and your heritage, but it’s worth it"

"Joni's the greatest songwriter ever. And what a record. She writes as this omniscient narrator on this album, surveying everything from above, commenting on this world of women and predatory men she's created, and she has such power and agency as she does it. I've read about how music critics – male critics, let's be honest – struggled with this record at the time. Records like Blue, which touch on a woman's emotional struggles from a subjective standpoint, were so much easier and more comforting to them, I suppose. I love how she intimidated people, and didn't care. 
There's a great unreleased bootleg of demos of this album, called The Seeding Of Summer Lawns. Joni's got all these jazz cat musicians in, but she's written all these complicated flute and horn parts for them already, and sings them all, as they're all in her head. It's unbelievable. I can't speak highly enough of her, and of this."