"So it's spring, early summer in 1977. I'm a teenager that's started school. I read a book about a punk. I know something's happening. I heard 'God Save The Queen'. I started buying records like The Stranglers' 'Peaches' and The Clash's first album. I remember looking at the cover of the latter at a record store at the bottom of my street called Soundtrack Records. I remember looking at the three guys on the cover with brutally shorn hair, tight drainpipes and wearing shirts with Paul Simonon having a Union Jack stitched on over the pocket. There was also a photo of the Notting Hill riots with the police fighting the Rasta youth. Earlier that year I watched a documentary with my father about the Notting Hill riots at the carnival. I found it really inspirational because I just love seeing the youth rise up and take on the cops. It was a pre-punk moment of seditious confrontation that I found totally inspiring. Just seeing people saying ""fuck you"" to the system is always inspiring to me. In terms of the Clash album itself, the song titles even sound great, such as 'I'm So Bored With The U.S.A.', 'White Riot', 'London's Burning' – I was like, ""Fuck!"" before I'd even heard the record! It totally blew my mind and I ended up buying the record. For a long time I'd stood outside the record store and looked at the sleeve! This album was basically everything I was waiting for. It was my rock & roll. Previous to that, I'd heard rock songs on commercial top-40 radio stations, such as Deep Purple, The Who and Rolling Stones, but it felt like a different generation's music. So with The Clash, I finally found my thing. The songwriting on the Clash album is amazing. 'Remote Control' lyrically was about big business and not liking the things you do. You got no money, you got no power, they think you're useless and that's exactly how you feel. I thought, ""Fucking hell"" when I heard it back. You still felt as a kid scared of going into the adult world when you left school. The song wasn't rock bravado or being macho but about being a young person going out into the world for the first time feeling powerless, which was empowering because when you relate to something, you feel stronger. 'Hate & War' was another song that took the hippie ideal of love and peace and turned it on its head by saying: ""There ain't no love and peace, this is the '70s, it's fucking hate and war here."" Punk rock was my portal and pathway to being a creative person. And the first Clash album was everything to set me on my way. Even now, I feel quite emotional talking about this. It's the most emotional record the Clash made because there's something really pure about it. I also think there's a humanism that the Clash have that the Pistols didn't, as the latter were just pure rage. For those reasons, this record is my life."

"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."