"What don't I say about Aja? We all have our different experiences with Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, but everything that they've created throughout the years is really awesome. I have a few albums of theirs I love; Can't Buy A Thrill, Katy Lied, Pretzel Logic, but there's a number of reasons why I am totally in love with Aja. It stems from the personnel, the feel, and how much it was a stab in another direction of pop culture. It was anti-pop, it was a bit on the outskirts of everything, I think. It's always funny listening to Donald Fagen singing about stuff because it's like, 'what's the guy rambling on about?' sometimes. A couple of my favourite musicians are on it; like Steve Gadd and, again, Michael McDonald. When I realised this was Michael McDonald singing background I lost my fucking mind, like, straight up. I always loved the Doobie Brothers and I knew his hits because of hip hop and stuff, but I remember being like 'Who's this magical person singing these dissonant chords behind the changes with ease with this weird timbre of voice?' – and you look at the credits and of course it's Michael McDonald. Aja, if I can't listen to it in its entirety then I get mad; I get pissed because I want to go through the whole album every time. One of my favourite moments on the album is Steve Gadd playing out on actual song 'Aja'; the way that just like the drum feels and everything – I don't know how to play drums but I love to try to act like I play drums to that one moment when he takes a slight solo at the end. Steve Gadd was always one of my favourite drummers ever because of the choices of records and stuff that he would do. Aja is he was he was one of those moments that it spanned out to everybody at that point. It was like at the height of their popularity. That was what happened and it was perfect."

"There are certain bands that are hard to talk about, OMD, Simple Minds, where their earlier records were just phenomenal, and later on they made records that were too commercial and not quite as strong as their earlier ones. The first OMD album, Dazzle Ships and Architecture & Morality were flawless. They were beautiful, experimental, inspiring records, then a few years on they were making music for John Hughes movies, and they were good at it and I'm glad that they had success with it, but it wasn't nearly as creatively inspiring as the first three records. Architecture & Morality, I mean it's not hard to overdo the hyperbole, but it's a perfect album, so cohesive, and every song perfectly speaks to the other song, the unapologetic emotional quality of it is really inspiring. Even the artwork by Peter Saville, everything about it is perfectly crafted. One of my very odd musical moments was years ago when I was at South By South West in Austin and OMD were doing a reunion show at a BBQ at three in the afternoon, and they asked me to play bass with them. I found myself playing bass with OMD on 'Enola Gay' at a BBQ at three in the afternoon in Texas. It was one of those moments where you told me that actually I'd just done way too much mescaline and I was currently lying on a bed somewhere and making up the whole thing, I'd believe you. It's a shame that a lot of people came to know of OMD through the last couple of records that were more commercial. It's like Simple Minds, the first five albums are amazing, and then they became a stadium rock band. Now you mention Simple Minds and people think about 'Alive And Kicking' and 'Don't You Forget About Me' which aren't terrible songs, but the earlier stuff was experimental and textural and weird. Maybe someone sees OMD on this list and immediately thinks of a John Hughes movie, maybe they'll be inspired to back and listen to Architecture & Morality."

"Tobi Vail, the drummer from Bikini Kill told me about them, and I went to the record store and bought it and I smoked too much pot and listened to it and I was like, "WHAAAAAAAT?!" There was so much in it, and it was not because I was stoned, because then I listened to it not stoned and I still kept finding stuff in it. Sonically they really changed my world and the freedom and the looseness. They were funny, tough and experimental. In my small town there was a certain sound formula that people were doing and I was like, "Man!" I appreciated women being able to experiment outside of these genre boundaries. They sounded so determined and weird to me. They taught me about production. I listened to that album so many times to figure out how it was produced: which side the guitar was panned to, was there a double guitar? I would just sit here and pick it apart in a way that I had never wanted to pick something apart before. To me the sound of that album and the way it was produced was such a great reflection of their material. It just really got me thinking about and being excited about production. This was probably a couple of years into Bikini Kill. There was also a radio interview we heard with them, they were asked about sexism and stuff like that and every time they'd moan and make crazy dog noises because they clearly were always asked about gender and were so sick of it. I'm always trying to be super diplomatic but they were just such awesome brats. Some guy called up and was like, "I'm really interested in your show I can't wait to see it" and they were like, "I'm in the phone box around the corner", just making fun of him like he was some perv. They were fun punks and it's not just about the funniness of it but also about speaking back to power and you can do that through humour."

"We played with the line-up from this album at 2007's All Tomorrow's Parties. We were allowed to curate a day and we brought them over. That record A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die just got reissued on Superior Viaduct and they played a couple of shows in California. Danny Bland - a guy I knew from way back from the band Cat Butt, works very closely for Dave Alvin from Flesh Eaters [and The Blasters] - asked me if they came to Seattle, would we want to play with them and I was like: "Fuck yeah!" They were great man. They exceeded expectations I think and there were a lot of people at the show who were probably not familiar with the record but were familiar with the guys. They're like "we like The Blasters, we like X" but it's a totally different beast to those bands. It's got more of a Captain Beefheart, early Dr. John feel to it with the marimbas on the record, the Steve Berlin sax (another record with sax!). It was kind of an anomaly at the time. It was part of the punk scene but it wasn't a punk record. There was this thing at the time that I confused it with at first - bands like 45 Grave and Christian Death and the Dance With Me-era TSOL where everything was kind of getting satanic. I initially lumped it in with that stuff but it's so much better and further ahead of the game than that. The record for me was kind of a slow burn. I worked in a radio station and when it came in I put it on a cassette with a more normal hardcore band on the other side. I eventually found myself fast-forwarding through the hardcore side and just listening to A Minute To Pray, A Second To Die over and over again. It wasn't like initially "this is great!", it was more like "this is weird!" to a 19-year-old. Chris Desjardins' lyrics are awesome and dense and intense and pretty much like Nick Cave's. Both those guys - they don't write short, concise pop songs."