"I've got a great friend, Todd Robinson, who runs a shop called Luna Music in Indianapolis, and we've been on lots of road trips together in America over the years. We both bond over music like this, stuff that has an American alt-psych-folk-rock feel. I find it a really appealing sound, and it's usually lifted by a great voice. Gold Leaves have that with Grant Olsen, who has such a beautiful voice. It's part beautiful, part-weary, part-determined, part-resigned. The music, too, is all a bit casual on the outside, a bit Lee Hazlewood, a bit Scott Walker, a bit melancholy, but it all comes together into something really special. We played this driving down the Pacific Coast Highway. It was perfect.
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"I’ve got three Pac albums on here, so we can consolidate two of them. Everyone knows I’m a super-duper Pac fan, but when Me Against The World dropped I was 10 years old. So even being 10 years old, I still knew the importance of this album. I knew how ill the shit he was saying was, and how emotional he sounded. I was ten years old, but I could connect to the dude. ""It’s like now, when I’m traveling on the road, a parent will bring their 11-year-old kid to me and say, ‘You’re his favorite rapper. He loves you.’ I’ll think, ‘Yo, he’s 11!’ I have to remember that when I was young, I got it too. I understood it. So it reminds me of that. It’s a classic. ‘Dear Mama’ is a fucking classic. The song ‘Me Against The World’ is a classic. ‘Temptations’ and ‘So Many Tears’ are my favorite songs on there.” ”As far as All Eyez On Me, that was the first double disc in hip-hop. The fact that he even had the fucking audacity to make a double disc. [Laughs.] And make both discs incredible and able to stand on their own two feet, that's crazy to me.”"

"I’ve got three Pac albums on here, so we can consolidate two of them. Everyone knows I’m a super-duper Pac fan, but when Me Against The World dropped I was 10 years old. So even being 10 years old, I still knew the importance of this album. I knew how ill the shit he was saying was, and how emotional he sounded. I was ten years old, but I could connect to the dude. ""It’s like now, when I’m traveling on the road, a parent will bring their 11-year-old kid to me and say, ‘You’re his favorite rapper. He loves you.’ I’ll think, ‘Yo, he’s 11!’ I have to remember that when I was young, I got it too. I understood it. So it reminds me of that. It’s a classic. ‘Dear Mama’ is a fucking classic. The song ‘Me Against The World’ is a classic. ‘Temptations’ and ‘So Many Tears’ are my favorite songs on there.” ”As far as All Eyez On Me, that was the first double disc in hip-hop. The fact that he even had the fucking audacity to make a double disc. [Laughs.] And make both discs incredible and able to stand on their own two feet, that's crazy to me.”"

"You asked for albums, but albums are already a bit away from pop because of they're a more serious proposition, so all of these are albums that I own on vinyl, and because I'm of a certain age that's what I think of as a record. We didn't have a big record collection in our house when I was growing up, but my mum had three Beatles albums, Sgt Pepper, Revolver and Abbey Road. Even though I was a kid I could tell that Sgt Pepper and Revolver sounded like music that had happened a while ago, but Abbey RoadM sounded more modern. It still does sound quite modern, because on second side where all the songs run into each other, that's quite a thing, not many people had done that since and not many have since. There's an art to an album. If you've got an album that's got a shit song on it, especially if it's in the middle of a side, you're not going to play it as much because you know you're going to have to get up and skip that track. That's what I've tried to do with these, it's records that I don't mind putting on then you can relax or talk to people or whatever, but you know you're not going to get some kind of fucking horrible shitty stinker of a song on it. Abbey Road - I was young at the time, 10, 11, 12, whatever, and the track that ends side one, 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' that was mind-blowing to me, the way it went on and on and on at the end, with this big synthy wooshy noise. I've since found out its Ringo playing this machine that sounds like wind that you get in classical orchestras. It was a psychedelic experience in a living room in a normal part of Sheffield in the early 70s, where, you know, psychedelic experiences weren't that common. I'll always remember it, that song in particularly took me somewhere. And that's the end of that side - if you had Abbey Road on CD it wouldn't be right, it only really works as a statement if you listen to it for ages and then it suddenly stops and then you're left in silence for a while until you can be bothered to get up and start again. I started with this because it plays with what an album can be. It's great.
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"I associate this album with a specific moment in my life. We never had a TV until I was about 16, so we would only hear about stuff like The Simpsons and Neighbours from friends. They seemed exotic and distant. But this one time I did see an episode of Neighbours in which one of the main characters got hit by a car, and it really fucked me up! I'd never seen anything like it before. And so, as I was driving home, my mum had Sgt. Pepper's on in the car and I was listening to 'A Day In The Life', and I was looking at a certain spot in the road, and I heard the line, which goes ""he blew his mind out in a car"", and it all suddenly came together. I imagined a car crash and I imagined this spot on the road and I imagined what I'd just seen with this song. And I think that is the first time that I genuinely understood the concept of death. I was probably only about five. That's the thing about The Beatles, you can get it into you from zero up. I never forgot that feeling of being petrified and understanding death for the first time. And the music did that to me. It wasn't Neighbours or the road, it was the fact that somehow that song had transported me and helped me to understand a real emotion. He [Lennon] had been dead about five years at that point. Children love The Beatles, and they love Queen, because there is something about those bands that is so colourful and fun and they create such a world. And the Sgt. Pepper's world is so easy to visualise, you can literally hear the crowd and the characters and the colours, the carnival air. It's all just magical. I've always enjoyed the fact that my band doesn't sound the same from song to song, and I think we get that from The Beatles. The Beatles were every type of band for ten years, and then they were nothing, which is probably why they are the most famous band in the world."