"Between 25 and 30, we put out our second album, A Series of Sneaks, on Elektra, and were quickly dropped from the label afterward. At that point, I didn’t think the band was going to exist or that I would be able to keep putting out records. I didn’t know what was going to happen and I didn’t have any money and I was living in a shitty apartment in Austin for a while, in a friend’s extra room. I felt pretty directionless. But getting dropped made us come up with that single, “The Agony of Lafitte”/“Lafitte Don’t Fail Me Now,” [which took aim at the band’s Elektra A&R rep, Ron Laffitte]. We were advised not to do it, but it turned everything around. It was really the first story we had. We did it because it was funny and cathartic—someone came up with the song titles, and they were too good not to make a single out of. So I went and wrote the songs. It was a little revenge. It felt good. The next summer, I went to New York and worked a bunch of temp jobs. I latched onto one gig at Citibank, where I had to wear a tie every day, and I kinda got into it. I liked the idea of taking the subway from Brooklyn into the city and working in a high rise every day. It wasn’t anything I felt passion for, but there was something about it that I found a little romantic. And it paid really well, like $23 an hour, which seemed like crazy money in that moment. We had no business making our next album, Girls Can Tell. There was no reason why anyone would want to put out a Spoon record again. We had blown it in the indie world and in the major label world. We were tainted. We had been advised by everyone that we worked with to start another band, or take on a different name. But we just kept doing these local shows, and I kept coming up with these songs, like “Anything You Want” and “Lines in the Suit,” and I felt real proud of them. So we recorded them. I didn’t want to use another name. This was the band. That was also when I got into the Kinks. This was around the time you could start buying CDs on the internet, and there was this thing where if you signed up for this online CD store you could get a free album as your first order as long as it was an address that hadn’t been used before. So I got the entire Kinks catalog by sending CDs to all my friends addresses and my mom’s address and my PO box. And Face to Face was the first one that I got. I could feel a lot of vulnerability in his lyrics, and there were a lot of songs that were just about a single thing, like a train or a party line, just one little notion. I love that. A song like “The Fitted Shirt” would not have existed without the Kinks."

"Along with Patti Smith and Mary Margaret O'Hara, I would say that Nina Simone possesses the greatest voice I have ever heard. Nina's voice, my god, on songs like 'Sinner Man' or 'I Put A Spell On You' is beyond compare. If you really want to get Nina Simone, you need to get on YouTube and watch the early footage. There is 25 minutes of footage of a performance she did in England, after Martin Luther King had been shot, and she is playing to mainly a white audience. It is the greatest set of protest songs I have ever seen. It puts Dylan or anyone else into the shade. If you wish to see how to change the world with music, look at this dignified woman holding back her rage at what had been done to her people. [Fighting back tears] Nina Simone carried the weight of black experience more fully than anyone else I have heard. There is also some amazing footage of her dancing with the audience. It's when she was less bitter and her bipolar disorder hadn't kicked in, and she is dancing and singing. When you watch her move, you can see the music is in every part of her body. With the songs Nina wrote, her position in the civil rights movement, and then the fact she became broken, it is just one of the most devastating stories. [Crying]. But, her voice, fucking hell. And the song 'Ain't Got No, I Got Life' – on which she lists all the things that she hasn't got, but then lists all the things she does have, which are her passion and her spirit – gets me every time. It's important people go and check out the early footage on YouTube. When she sings 'I Put A Spell On You', you fucking know she has put a spell on that guy, who was her ex-husband. You do not fucking mess with that woman. I heard a lovely anecdote about Angelo Badalamenti, who was a desperately impoverished guy who had just given up his job to become a songwriter. He had been earning nothing for 18 months, and had sent some songs to Nina Simone. He got a call from her manager saying that Nina would like to meet him. He went to the place at the arranged time, walked into a room and there was this amazing lioness, lying on a sofa dressed in leopard skin. She said, ""I hear you have some songs for me. Play me one."" There was no piano, so he had to sing to her. He sang about a minute of 'I Hold No Grudge' and she said, ""I will take that"" and asked him if had any more. He sang another song for about 30 seconds, and she said, ""I will take that too"", and he sang a snippet from another one, which she also liked. Within two weeks, she had recorded all three songs and launched his career as a writer. Angelo told me that story when I made an album with him."