"I wasn't sure if I could pick Pixies as well as The Breeders, but fuck it! They're two different bands. I wanted to put this in here because seeing as this is the story of The Big Moon, as a band we have quite a broad range of music tastes. We all love bands and guitar music generally, but there are so many styles and it can go so many different ways. We all like a lot of the same bands but there aren't that many songs where we have that special cross-over moment and we find a song that we all adore. In the van, whoever’s driving gets to play whatever they want. Quite soon after we formed as a band we went round to Fern's house to try and think of a band name. We had this great night where we got really drunk and danced to Tom Jones. I seem to remember making quite a lot of mess, spilling drinks and stuff. It was just four girls getting very drunk together. We all realised that we loved this song and someone put it on the playlist. We were thinking about calling our band No Aloha after that, for about a week. We even wrote it in big letters on Fern's bedroom wall. We thought it'd be a really cool name, but then in the end we thought it'd be a bit of a mouthful to say on stage - "Hi, We're No Aloha!" - and we didn't want a lifetime of spelling it to people. But whenever it comes on in the van we're always like "yaaaay"!"

"I hadn't actually heard this song one before we played Carnegie Hall last year [for The Music of David Bowie concert featuring the Pixies, Debbie Harry, Cyndi Lauper and Michael Stipe]. We were the house band and had quite a few artists coming on to play, so I had to learn it. For me, it wasn't an obvious one. When I first heard it, I even thought it was a terrible song! Like it wasn't even a song! That was just my first impression of it. But it was only when I started playing it, and trying to do my own version of it, that I realised that it all fit perfectly. It was great to play live. It was just him throwing something together - it's unserious, a totally unpretentious concept, and the music just fits the lyrics so perfectly. You know, the drums are not that tight, and there are drum rolls where you think: 'Wow, that's like a beginner that's just been playing drums for six months!' But then you play it and it actually fits! It's really weird. It fits the idea of always crashing in the same car. If it had been played technically correctly it wouldn't have worked. For me, it was a good example of how everything in the backing of a song has to line up with the message of a song. I think a lot of music these days, gets into this over-produced, too-tight, no feel thing, but you can't fault it. It's correct. The dots are all in the right place, but there is no soul. Or even, there isn't a message to grab a hold of and it all falls down. It's so easy now to put something together in your bedroom on your computer that sounds like a finished record, but if you don't have those same elements there that make a good song, you may as well not bother!"

"I've got no idea what it's about but from what I can tell it's about a monkey that explodes things, a monkey that likes the colour red but doesn't like green apples, so he explodes the apples. I just think it's really cool. I love The White Stripes. I love Jack White. I love Meg White. I love how simple their songs are, and instinctive. It feels like they've just started playing at that moment and they're making it up as they go along, just seeing how and where it goes. Even the lyrics - the ""exploding monkey"" - it feels so random. They let the music go where it wants to go naturally, they don't get bogged down trying to glue together complicated bits of melody. Quite a lot of the process of songwriting is trying to find ways to stick bits together and it becomes mathematical in that way. Sometimes you get swamped and weighed down with two bits of music that you can't find a way of joining. And then I listen to The White Stripes and think ""Ahh! You just play them next to each other, you don't have to join them."" It's like what I said about Pixies, they make me feel like music can be anything and can be as simple and as messy as you want. And as loud as you want! I find it really freeing. A lot of songwriting is getting in the right frame of mind, so it's good to have this music that doesn't make you feel worried about what you're doing and not be overly precious about it. If one bit of music isn't working with another bit you've got, you can just throw it away and write another bit, it actually doesn't take very long and maybe it will be better. Or maybe it will be worse, but whatever! There's something magical about it. I loved the three-colour thing the White Stripes did, the little codes in the lyrics about the number three and the symbolism in the album covers. And the way they pretended to be brother and sister! Or were they? Or weren't they?! They're just so fucking cool. Out of all the bands to come out of the last twenty years I think they're one of the best. I'm also so glad they broke up. I'm so glad they stopped and that Jack White does his other stuff now. They left the things that they did and they didn't change. It was just perfect."

"This has a similar story to Pixies and Beastie Boys in that it came out when I was in high school and me and all our friends totally lost our mind over it. We'd watch it every week and then the next day at school we'd confer and talk about what happened. Which is funny because so many of my conversations with my friends now are so similar. Especially now that you can binge-watch all of these TV shows and TV is just so good right now that it dominates all of our conversations. Especially with a show like True Detective which is kind of like a mystery and you talk about all the weird stuff, you theorise and come up with all these conspiracies. So it was like that with Twin Peaks and that was the first time that I ever had that relationship with a TV show. Then after that there wasn't another TV show that I replaced it with. It was very specific to Twin Peaks. And it was filmed in the region I lived in, the Pacific Northwest, and me and all my friends connected with that and felt a little bit of ownership over that. The music is really pretty and haunting. I actually bought the songbook so that I could learn how to play them. And I really like Julee Cruise, I thought her voice was really pretty. [Nancy played 'Twin Peaks Theme' as an intro the LCD Soundsystem's 'New York I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down' at their final show in 2011] When we first started playing 'New York I Love You…', I was still trying to learn how to play it, and I don't think I've ever played it the same twice. Even for the recording there was no music written for it. But then as I got more comfortable playing it I started doing different things with it. There's this bit in the middle where it slows down, like the bridge, or the part before the big outro, where it slows down and I can hear other songs that could fit in there. The first song I played in that little interlude was 'Empire State Of Mind', then I got bored of that and started doing Brian Eno's 'By This River', then we would even sing the whole of that song before going back into 'New York I Love You…' but my favourite is when I did 'Twin Peaks'."