9. Sufjan StevensCome On Feel The Illinoise!

I would say this record was a really rather big influence on me. It was at a time when I was starting to write music. It was probably what I was listening the most to in those first years of composing. It’s just really great music, and really good songwriting, and he seems to do it so effortlessly. It’s like he just sat down at the piano and played this masterpiece. That’s really what you feel when you listen to this record. It doesn’t feel composed. It feels like a jam, a perfect jam. The arrangements are also great: the strings, the brass. ‘John Wayne Gacy’ is my favourite on the record, definitely. I don’t listen to it a lot any more, but it was definitely a favourite of mine at a point in time. I listened to it way too much. It ruined it!