It is a direct quotation from and tribute to @toriamos's song "The Waitress". In my head, Pepper's mum plays a lot of Tori.

Tonight I took Ash (4) to see Joe Hisaishi conduct @MelbSymphony Studio Ghibli music. Ash was joyfully entranced and first to clap.

I can play those over and over again.

Merritt is one of our great songwriters. Until now he’s made a point of saying: these songs are not about me. And suddenly, having done that, he writes one song for year of his life,” Gaiman said, “The first 25 years are funny, and the second 25 years keep breaking your heart, over and over again

Indeed, Gaiman claims that one of his great sorrows in life was learning that his father had tickets for the final Ziggy Stardust show but didn’t take him because it was a school night. And don’t get him started on Tori Amos, whose devotion to The Sandman led to a close friendship, or The Magnetic Fields, a.k.a. “My favorite live band.” Gaiman even bought 69 Love Songs in bulk so he could give it away to friends.

I was sent a link to a video, maybe about 2007, of a Jason Webley song called 'Eleven Saints'. And I loved it, and I put up the video. And Jason suddenly found himself with many thousands more people seeing his video than before. He got in touch and he sent me some of his CDs. And this one broke my heart. It's an incredibly powerful album.

As I get older, I'm finding it harder and harder to write with stuff with lyrics in the background, because I listen to them more and more. In the old days I would happily write and write fiction, with stuff that had good words. And if it didn't have good words, it kind of bored me. And Nyman was the first stuff that I found where I could just do it. It was great.

I picked this one because I love it lyrically, and I remember sitting there trying to decipher the lyrics. I would have been 16, 17, maybe even 18. Definitely an Elvis Costello fan. I'd bought and loved the first three albums.

But what I love about Lou is that he wasn't perfect. I'd listened to Berlin at this point, I had Rock N Roll Animal, I had Lou Reed Live. I'd been looking for the first album for ages and finally I found it.

And I thought, actually, one of the things that I loved about Nouvelle Vague was that it gave me these songs that I knew, and it gave them back to me in this wonderful upside down way as if they were being played in a little French cafe at three o'clock in the morning and there's a glorious girl chanteuse and she does not even know what the lyrics mean, but they're just doing these punk and post-punk songs I grew up on.

It is really hard picking a Bowie album. I picked Diamond Dogs because it was kind of mine. It was science fiction, it came out when I was 13-and-a-half, and it was a weird mash-up of this strange, dystopian, mutanty 1984.

She has a song called 'When Did You Get So Safe' that isn't on this album, which became almost my mantra while I was at one point where I was starting to feel that I was becoming safe because I was popular. And I didn't like being safe. And it meant a lot to have that in the back of my head.

I could have picked any of the Thea albums and I would have been pretty much as happy. Avalanche is probably the one that has more songs that are my favourites on it than any of the other ones.

For me, the great post-punk album is Cast Of Thousands. It's one of the strangest examples of an album happening at the wrong time or just happening ahead of the curve.

I downloaded all her albums, and Tongue was the one that really stuck with me. It's literate, smart post-punk, rocky, faintly raunchy. If you listen to the title track, there is so much glorious female fury in it. And love and lust.

And as I drove off to Florida to write American Gods, I found it in a record shop and bought all three volumes and played them over and over. And then started buying them for people as presents. Which was very expensive, buying three different CDs. And finally, I think in the winter of 1999 I contacted Chris Ewen, who put me in touch with Claudia Gonson, and I said, “Can I just buy these from the band directly, because I want to give them out as Christmas presents and this is killing me?” And she said, “Sure.” So I bought 20 of the actual box sets, and I gave them to Terry Pratchett, and I gave them to Scott McLeod and all of these people, who also became Magnetic Fields devotees. That album has to be given to you by somebody that you love.

The first version of Little Earthquakes I heard was handed to me at San Diego Comic Con by a man named Rantz Hoseley, who said, “Here's a cassette tape by a friend of mine, she sings about you on one of the songs, go and see her.” And it wasn't actually Little Earthquakes. It was 50 per cent Little Earthquakes and 50 per cent things that wound up on B-sides, like 'Flying Dutchman' and 'Sugar', and a lot of songs that could have been on Little Earthquakes and were at one point or another recorded for it. So Little Earthquakes for me, in my head, is probably actually that tape. Because that was the thing that I played over and over and over.

I was this little kid who loved Gilbert and Sullivan, and the song 'Soho (Needless To Say)' came across like a WS Gilbert patter song, but it was a WS Gilbert patter song about Soho on a Friday night, “Chocolate coloured ladies making eyes through the smoke pall”, “Rainstorm, brainstorm, faces in the maelstrom/ Huddle by the puddles in the shadows where the drains run”. That's glorious!

There's much better Al Stewart albums out there. In fact, it's almost a car crash, because prior to that time he was a troubadour of the bedsit, this folk singer creating these little songs of pain and alienation in a rather damp, middle-class kind of way. And after that, he was doing weird folk-pop about weird historical matters and pop culture and goes off into really cool places. This one album is the place where that whole thing intersects.

I was sitting round a campfire and somebody was playing 'Who Loves The Sun', and I started just quietly singing along, and Amanda said, “What are you singing? What is that?” And I said, “It's from Loaded.” And she said, “I have no idea what that is.” And I said, “But you like Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground.” And she said, “Yeah, but I never heard of that album.” So I went onto iTunes and bought it for her, and then started listening to it myself, and just going, “This actually is as great an album as I thought it was when I was 13."