Tim is a songwriter who is always growing, evolving, questioning, re-examining and re-contextualizing his material. he really is one of the most talented songwriters of our time, and i’m proud to call him a friend. i can’t wait to watch him make more and more music.

Best string arrangement ever, and composed by Beck’s dad! I’ve been obsessed with his album Sea Change ever since it came out in 2002, and I always come back to it. I saw Natalie Merchant at a talk a few months ago, when I’d just given birth, and she told a story about how this was the only album that would make her daughter go to sleep in the car.

GAME ON!! @xbillhx strikes back with an iron maiden vinyl. and for the record (no pun intended) that’s watermelon on his mouth, not the blood of virgins.

That was another record I probably found when I was 16 years old. I'd heard of Brian Eno, but didn't know what he was. I found that album in a cut-out [discounted, end-of-line albums] bin of a hardware store that happened to selling music, for reasons I don't understand to this day. Among the Kenny G and New Kids on the Block cut-outs, I saw Brian Eno. 'I've heard of Brian Eno. I'm pretty sure he's supposed to be cool. What's he doing here?' I bought the tape, because it was only $2.99, took it home and just had my little domepiece blown. Again, here was this really weirdly beautifully produced record, where I could barely understand where the sounds were coming from. But he sounded like a refugee from theatre world, because the songs were so rich and dramatic and theatrical, and painted such vivid lyrical pictures. It was right up my fucking alley, and it hit me at the perfect time.

Robyn Hitchcock is another one of my songwriting heroes. He gets a special fucking prize for following his songwriting impulses better than anyone on the planet. He's so wonderfully unapologetic in his songwriting style that I think he really influenced me to remove filters. His songs often follow a kind of inner logic unto themselves.

I think that this is one of the best albums of all time. It's hard to talk about. I feel like that album is the Sgt Pepper's of my generation. It's a record that knits together a whole generation of music-lovers. The fact that it's separate and isolated is sort of poetic. My generation wasn't connected by a band; we didn't have a Beatles. We had our own bizarre little pockets of music, our own separate ways of listening and connecting.

What can you say? He's Nick Cave. He belongs in this mysterious closet. I love that he's so impossible to categorise. I remember hearing his music for the first time when I was 15 or 16, and having no idea what to make of him. I almost still don't. He belongs in a genre unto himself. The one thing I love so much about Nick Cave is that he's a master craftsman. He considers himself a writer, and you can really hear it in his songs in a way that's highly unusual. The way he crafts a song is like no other. He makes no bones about the fact that he's putting a certain kind of poetry to a certain kind of music in a way that just isn't really done nowadays. And he's an incredible performer.

The Cure were my gateway drug – a year or two later I discovered the Legendary Pink Dots, because I had a boyfriend who was really into them. That blew my mind. It was an entirely new way of being into a band, because they weren't well known. And the music touched me in a place that the Cure couldn't ever dream of reaching. Part of that had to do with the intimacy and depth of Edward Ka-Spel's songwriting, but also the fact that this was a band that no one in my high school had heard of. They were really, really special – they were my band. I became a devotee.

With Depeche Mode, the sounds intrigued me, but I never really cared about the band. I loved those records, and I collected them, and pretty much had every Depeche Mode studio record, but I never saw them live and I never wanted to marry Martin Gore. That was my next-door neighbour. She had Martin Gore, and I had Robert Smith. As alternative teenagers, we had to pick our alliances carefully. I liked Depeche Mode, but I loved the Cure. That was a very important distinction for me.

The Cure was my favourite band. The Cure covered my walls, they were on the T-shirts I wore, Robert Smith was who I was going to marry when I grew up. At 15, that's how I defined myself. I owned all the B-sides and rarities and all the bootlegs and went to see them live whenever I could.

I recently realised that I was leaving the Thompson Twins out of my list of influences because I subconsciously felt they were embarrassing. But I listened to a lot of Thompson Twins. Into the Gap was my favourite when I was 12 or 13. When I go back and revisit those records, some of it sounds a little dated, but actually they hold up really well. I feel like the songwriting of the Thompson Twins is one of the overlooked treasures of the 80s. It's really, really good. There are songs that tend towards the cheesy side, like 'Doctor Doctor', but if you listen to the deep songs on those records, the songwriting is fantastic. The lyrics are really, really good.

I was really into musical theatre. I was the dorky kid who listened to Evita on my walkman as I walked down the street smoking, thinking I was so cool. A couple of my favourite records from that era really speak to that. This is a super theatrical record. The songs are stories and portraits of characters. The music doesn't suggest it, but you can totally see that shit onstage. I just loved it. I loved the immediacy of Marc Almond's vocals. Again, just a totally believable singer, not phoning it in.

I got this in sixth grade. First of all, the artwork, with those two mannequins sitting at a table, was so weird. That by itself puts it into a class of its own, because most of the other records in my collection just had pictures of pop stars. The songwriting was so beautiful and so simple and so strong, but I was also really compelled by Alison Moyet's voice. Still to this day, I generally don't like chick singers – their high squeaky voices irritate me! But Alison Moyet, sort of like Laurie Anderson, had this really beautiful, growly, rough, bluesy, believable voice. When she sang, I just bought every second of it. I believed her. And the tracks are catchy as all get out. 'In My Room' is one of my favourite songs of all time – the band and I are working on a cover of it.

Laurie Anderson I discovered in college along with a whole other collection of artists, like Philip Glass, John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. I took an experimental music class when I was 18, which opened up this entire world of music I'd been missing. In high school I listened to Einsteurzende Neubauten and I'd pick up weird-looking found sound records from the used record bin at my local record store, but this was the first time I'd really studied it.

Violent Femmes was a huge high-school record. I probably got it when I was 14 or 15. I just played the entire album on stage with [Femmes bassist] Brian Ritchie, Brian from the Dresden Dolls and [Bad Seed] Mick Harvey, so I found myself revisiting the record and my early experiences of it. The one thing I remembered was that when I heard that record for the first time, I thought Gordon Gano was a girl. But really sexy!

I don't think I can explain how significant that record was to me. And the more I travel through my life as a musician, the more I find myself coming back to it again and again. My mom had a giant stack of vinyl – mostly classical, with a few rock records. When I was seven or eight years old and started listening to music by myself, that album became the daily soundtrack to my life. I would ask someone to put the record player on for me and I would sit there with big headphones one, listening, and having the record flipped over again and again and again. I would put the music on and just stare at the cover for 45 minutes. The artwork was so important.

I know that The Cure did this for me, The Legendary Pink Dots did this for me, Leonard Cohen did this for me. I’m not sure I’ll ever be doing that for anyone, but I know that I want to be like them. I know that I want to write music about my pain, but then it was like a magic trick.

I know that The Cure did this for me, The Legendary Pink Dots did this for me, Leonard Cohen did this for me. I’m not sure I’ll ever be doing that for anyone, but I know that I want to be like them. I know that I want to write music about my pain, but then it was like a magic trick.

I know that The Cure did this for me, The Legendary Pink Dots did this for me, Leonard Cohen did this for me. I’m not sure I’ll ever be doing that for anyone, but I know that I want to be like them. I know that I want to write music about my pain, but then it was like a magic trick.