"Now the heaviness comes! It's up there with Sehnsucht by Rammstein: just pure molten lava, classic metal. Alice In Chains were such a weird band: losing their singer, when he had gangrene and was addicted, and they went and did a record with fucking Elton John… just a truly bizarre band! Jerry Cantrell was the guitarist, and Layne Staley was the singer who sadly passed away. If you look at old footage of Layne Staley, he really was one of the most doom-laden, foreboding metal presences you could ever wish to see. Look at old footage of him and he'll just stand there, stock still, with his glasses on and he always had his arms covered because there was always something bad going on with him, but his voice just came out of him like the eternal cracking of the oldest oak in the mythical forest. His voice was just wipeout, it was so low and had so much meaning. And Jerry Cantrell was such a pointed, furious, lumpen but spry guitarist, and there hasn't been a classic metal album for a long time I think. This is a bit of a shit muso point, but I think a lot of that is down to modern day metal musicians tuning down. They do this drop, this detuning where everything is just 'du-doom du-doom du-doom'. That's why you don't get this kind of music anymore, because all the guitars are tuned too low. But Jerry Cantrell obviously has a classicist's mind when it comes to metal, and the song 'Them Bones'... it's a simple rudimentary chord, but as soon as it comes on there's a spectral, dying scream in the background, four chords going up in semitones, and it's just like, "Fuck me… how do people find this erudition out of simplicity?" That's when rock & roll is at its best, when it finds that complexity in simplicity, and power in loss or whatever you want to call it."

"The first heard time I heard Roxy Music I was smitten. I was in a record store and I asked the guy ‘What are you playing?’ They used to put the record jackets on the front desk, I picked it up and they looked like a band from outer space. I couldn’t figure out what was going on, but I loved everything about it, ‘Virginia Plain’ was just an incredible sounding song. It’s the way the synthesiser bends at the start, then the songs kicks in and Bryan Ferry’s singing is so over the top and melodramatic, I’m not even sure what he’s singing about. There’s those breaks where they jam in the middle, the keyboard and synth solos. It was the sonic template, it sounded completely otherworldly to me. I felt a kinship with Roxy Music. I grew up listening to The Who and The Beatles and they were rock stars, but I felt Roxy Music were sort of my peers. With a lot of the new wave and punk bands I thought ‘I can do this, I can be in bands and do what they’re doing.’ It didn’t sound anything like the classic rock records I’d been listening to, it was arty, very flamboyant and kind of crude in a way. It was a bit pretentious but I liked that, I found it really fresh at the time that they had an art-school approach to the music and yet the music was very DIY, it wasn’t slick. They were great musicians but didn’t sound like virtuoso bands like Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer, though I did have some ELP records too! I fell in love with Roxy Music, I bought all their records, their solo records and live bootlegs. I was the self-appointed president of the Roxy Music fan club in Madison, there were only seven members. For a couple of years, once every two months we’d have a ‘Roxython’ on a Saturday night until the sun came up, we’d play their albums and dress up in very flamboyant clothes. It was great."

"The reason I chose “Temptation” was because it gave me the confidence to write a song called “Pure”. I’d made my first album and it was quite difficult, because I didn’t have a band and I’d recorded it all at home. I was lucky in that it had done quite well and “Pure” had been in the charts in America and stuff like that, but I felt like I didn’t quite know what to do. It didn’t feel right to just hire a load of musicians and have a band that wasn’t really a band. Then I heard “Eye Know” by De La Soul and it was the first time that I’d heard people sampling records and using beats, I loved it and listened to it a lot. I’d been producing The Fall at the time and I was very friendly with a guy called Simon Rogers, who was a really good musician and he had a sampler. With hip-hop, they tended to have the samples and sing over the samples to come up with something, but I wondered if you could use the samples in your songs, and if it would be possible to craft a song while using samples. I don’t know if anyone had actually done that yet - it was mainly people singing over samples, but not making the samples fit in their tunes - so on the next album Sense that’s what I tried to do. It worked out quite well on the tracks like “Sense” and “The Life of Riley” but it was quite hard on the others. Then I honed it down and got better at it and I did Jollification, which is pretty much all recorded like that, with bits of samples. Jollification isn’t really a band, but a record constructed in a similar way to how De La Soul might have constructed 3 Feet High and Rising but using songs and not singing along over the record. That album really shone a light on how to make a more vibey and serendipitous record than if I just sat there with a computer."

"This album is a big one for me. My friend Michael Diamond from the Beastie Boys introduced me to it. He visited me in Portland and I took him to this record store that was $1 per record and it was just bins and bins of records. He said, ""Oh my god, you should totally get this, it's a great record"", so I got it. In it, Isaac Hayes is leading an orchestra and he's also at the piano and he's talking in between songs telling funny stories. So it's almost a cabaret performance. I didn't know what that was when I got the record. Well, I kind of did, as my uncle was a drag queen. But it was the fact that he would tell stories that would lead into a song. I had done that in Bikini Kill but people were just like, ""Shut up and just sing your song!"" and I was like, ""No! What if I specifically made it a part of the show and had things I was going to talk about?"" His stories would turn from tragic to funny. It really validated what I was doing but he was doing it better. I thought, instead of trying not to do it so I don't get shit I should just do it better. Keep doing it and doing it even better and make it more part of the show instead of less. The other huge thing was, ""Why don't I get to work with an orchestra? Why don't I get to work with really talented people and be like, 'No, let's change it to the key of B' like, 'This key would be better for my voice' and have people who really know what they're doing?"" I'm in that band now – not an orchestra, but I'm working with musicians where I'm like, ""Hey, can we do this song for my sweet spot vocally?"" I'm not the leader in the way that Isaac Hayes was on that album. That record really made me question why I didn't think of myself as someone able to work with people who can talk about things being sharp or flat."