"I grew up hearing the original Carter Family recording, my Father had it on an album compilation of their recordings. I grew up hearing that from my earliest memories and then he would play the song and sing it, sometimes on the guitar. He even wrote some other lyrics for it once for a family reunion to sing about the different branches of the family. Now, whenever I have the chance to I join in with a bluegrass jam session, which always ends every one of their jams. with playing and singing ‘Can The Circle Be Unbroken’ and even ending with everyone singing a capella, which is really a fun experience. I’ve always loved the song from when I was a little child and I still sing it and play it. It’s the only thing that would be on the list that I would ever sing and play, or at least regularly sing and play, so it’s part of my life. I really like the sentiment of it, especially the chorus. My father isn’t around anymore; he would play and sing it and my older brothers and sisters would play and sing it, so I grew up with that in the family, which is enormous for me. I feel like I’m a continuation of that."

"Whenever I listen to this I find myself quite overwhelmed by it. There was an interest in the '70s in that Bulgarian folk singing, the kind of singing where they sing in 2nds. One of the harmonies they use a lot is a 2nd, which is a very unusual interval, and I remember that being around and there being a great album called Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares, which is an amazing record, so I think I was aware that that part of the world had interesting music. I don't really remember how I got this one other than I bought it in France. The softness of the male voices is like softly blown flutes. If you grow up in England with the disgusting operatic tradition we have, where the men's voices have to be so manly, it makes you violently ill [laughs]. Hearing the softness of this was so touching to me. There's one section in one of these tracks that is too amazing, where the voices that are all woven together gradually separate out so that all the voices above a certain register keep on going higher and higher and the ones below keep going lower. It ends with this incredible chasm between the voices that is just startling."

"I was obsessed with them when I was in The Edmund Fitzgerald, so much so that I'd try to get on every bill with them. They were the most incredible live band I'd ever seen and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why they didn't change the generation in Britain. They definitely changed a lot of things for me. When that record came out, not only did I love the sound of it but also that it kind of made it feel possible to make a record and put it out. What's becoming clear to me as I go through this list is that there's something to do with people's voices that connect directly. All of Charlottefield were incredible musicians but there was something so animalistic about Thomas [House]'s scream - both live and the way they captured it on the first record. It's just so raw, there's something about his scream in particular - I could never quite grasp what he was singing about or what he was singing, but there was something searing about that scream that made me wanna play guitar obsessively and play shows and get on bills with them and made me wanna lose myself in music even further than I had done at that point."