"There might have been personal things in my life right here, because I wanted to strip things down. Another inspiration was a lot of country singer-songwriters. I’m friends with a guy named Terry Allen, who’s a great, very eccentric songwriter. Both of us have worked with Lucinda Williams, who everybody knows is an incredible songwriter. There’s an early group called the Flatlanders, and their first records or demos were just amazing. I was really immersed in these people who were writing very simply, as far as their musical arrangements, and very heartfelt. I was getting a lot of inspiration from them."

"This is one of those covers where it becomes the new artists’ song. At least to me. Lera Lynn is a killer singer/songwriter and I love this song. As far as I can tell, it’s about becoming a werewolf and then asking your partner to also become a werewolf, cause why not?"

"There was a bunch of local bands that hit me after that, like The Loved Ones from Philadelphia, which Dave Hause was in. I heard that record Keep Your Heart and I was like, ‘This is a punk band with real songs.’ They were a real songwriter band. They reminded me of The Jam. Jane was the song that really got me."

"I’ve been listening to The Incredible String Band, but that’s about it. The other night I sang with Mr Heron [Mike Heron, co-songwriter and co-frontman along with Robin Williamson] and Robyn Hitchcock, you see, we sang ‘A Very Cellular Song’ [13-minute epic from ‘The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter’] and it was fantastic, so that nudged me into listening to that album]"

"Donald Fagen's solo album is another of those albums that kind of teaches you what it is to be a songwriter. I feel like Donald Fagen did Aja for the musicians, and The Nightfly is for the songwriter. It's very much a concentrated idea. I remember getting turned on to this album by my home girl at the time; she was very much a muso. I would spend a lot of time listening to Steely Dan, and I didn't connect the dots – sometimes you don't connect them on your own. I had to be somewhere between 18 and 22 – somewhere in those years – she played me that album and I remember again, whenever I heard somebody create progressional music that are not normal choices, it always would perk my ears up, if it was somebody that would tastefully do something different or make some really outlandish choices, and Donald Fagen is the king of that. The Nightfly is one of those albums that I can't live without, that is where I come from as a songwriter. That again definitively is what created the songwriter in me, as compared to the bass player. The choice of the covers, the jazz covers, they feel like they were his songs, the way that he's playing them on the album – he made them real special. It was like it told his actual story of who he was, and I feel like that's the way you're supposed to play standards, not the part where you just learn it because it's cool. I think that there's some emotional connection that Donald Fagen had to these songs that he chose, along with the ones that he wrote on this album, and you can feel it. You can feel it. You can feel it. The Nightfly is a definitive album for me."

"This is another record that has taken up my time over the past decade or so and I think this is her best album. I can't wait for the next one. She's been brilliant in forging her own path and it's really exciting. She played with us on the Neon Neon stuff but she was releasing records, mostly in the Welsh language, for a few years before then. I think she's on a really interesting musical journey. She is an amazing songwriter, a very natural songwriter who could write anything. She was in LA but she's been in the Lake District for a couple of years now. With this record in particular, there are some incredibly profound songs and she makes experimentation and improvisation extremely palatable to the ears which is very hard to do. Just to be able to make really unique pop music is also incredibly hard to do!"