BEST FIT: This was the first song your older brother taught you to play on guitar

JD McPherson: I was playing some things on guitar and he’d show me some chords. Then I saw this song from The Song Remains the Same movie, that I was watching on late night television and that was my first exposure to Led Zeppelin.

What did you love about it?

I loved the acoustic guitar figure at the beginning and then when the song picks up, I was ‘I want to know how to do that.’ It was like seeing a magic trick and having to know how it's done.

For the first time I wanted to learn something that wasn’t a couple of cowboy chords, and luckily my brother knew it. He's sixteen years older than me, so he was around at the perfect time to have learned some of these tunes. I picked it up really quickly oddly enough; something about the hammer runs and pull-offs felt right. That sent me down a really dark path. I was hooked at that point, and I bought every Zeppelin record.

The second song I learned was “Stairway to Heaven” and my brother said, ‘If you can learn “Stairway”, you can learn anything.’ There are so many jokes about people learning to play that song in guitar stores and there’s the Wayne's World thing, but it’s such a massive thing, where it's beyond being a song you might hear on the radio. It's like it's larger than life. But the first one was “Over the Hills and Far Away” and it’s still one of my favourite Zep tunes.

Music was very tribal when I was at school. My first musical love was The Smiths, which put me in the indie kids crowd, and then there were the schoolkids who were into heavy metal who loved Led Zeppelin and the Tolkien associations. I remember a classmate telling me the title of this song came from the name of a Tolkien poem.

I have a strange connection to all this. And to touch on what you said, I loved those books when I was a kid, and then having met Robert, he was a kid when he was writing those songs, and he was really into those books about the same time.

I have a friend who's a polyglot, he speaks eight languages and can speak conversational Latin. He’s the smartest person I know and he's a bit of a Tolkien scholar. He always tells me that The Lord of the Rings trilogy is for the hoi polloi, and that there's a deeper well, a deeper reservoir. He told me about the similarities between what Tolkien was writing and what Jung was writing in The Red Book, and it really flipped my wig.

Jung was writing about the collective unconscious; he was doing this dream collection and automated writing. He would tap into that and draw and make these crazy paintings and write this crazy stuff. It was like free association. But at the same time, having never met, it turns out they were writing and drawing the same pictures. Tolkien would always say he wasn't writing, but that he was uncovering this stuff.

There's some strange thing going on that those guys were tapping into. There are swords, elves and Viggo Mortensen running around with beautiful, long curly locks, but there's also this other side of it and there's really something going on with that.

To what you said about being an indie rock fan first, I had the advantage of growing up completely isolated in rural southeast Oklahoma. So I also loved The Smiths but I also loved Van Halen and Madonna. I didn't have anybody telling me that I couldn't like all of those things.

I still meet people that just like being into early Rock and Roll and obscure Rockabilly records. When you travel in Europe you meet people who don’t like muddying the waters with other things. There's such a beautiful world of music out there, and I love that stuff as much as they do, but that's just humans I guess, some people like to join up in tribes.

BEST FIT: This is your ‘most life-altering song’ and it’s quite obscure, I couldn't find out much about it.

JD McPherson: This came after I was getting into The Stooges, Punk Rock and the burgeoning alternative scene, and I was already that, I wearing weird clothes and fighting off angry cowboys. I was definitely at least sixteen because I could drive to a music store that opened in McAlester, Oklahoma, which was an hour from my house.

It was called Noiztoyz and the purpose of the store was to sell tapes to people. I don't think they had this in the UK, but these guys would buy these little mini trucks, fill the beds up with speakers, play hip hop and rap music and they would pull into the Sonic Drive-In and rattle the roof of it. Then they’d drive away down the street, all in a line.

But this place could order things, so I’d go in there and ask, ‘Have you got any Johnny Burnette?’ and they’d say ‘No'. So I’d say, ‘Well, I’ll order some Johnny Burnette’.

This girl started working there who had moved up from Dallas, she was six foot five, blonde. I don't know what she was doing in McAlester, she was probably getting away from some stuff in Dallas, but she became kind of my lifeline. She recommended a lot of cool music to me, she told me about Jane's Addiction, Butthole Surfers and a few Texas bands.

They would buy collections and sell them and one day she said, ‘I was going to get rid of this because it’s never going to sell in this store. But I think you might like it.’ It was a Buddy Holly box set, and I was like, ‘Oh, okay’, but because she gave it to me, I listened to it.

I’d heard Buddy Holly's pop stuff on the oldies station I talked about earlier and it didn't really float my boat, but to hear the early music with Sonny Curtis on guitar, it was like a lightning bolt hit me.

What drew you to it?

It had that verve and vigour that the Ramones had, but it had great musicianship. It wasn't just rattling off 20 power chords; it was this incredible guitar playing from Sonny and I could immediately see it - ‘This is what I want to do. I want to start learning this’. And that's when it hit me, that that's Rock and Roll music.

I read that the producers wouldn't let Buddy Holly play guitar on this song, they said it had to be Sonny Curtis.

Yes, you can always tell when Buddy's the guitar player. He plays the same solo in multiple songs and I love that. Obviously, Buddy was a genius, he was 20 years old, and he wrote a million amazing songs. He didn't have the chops that Sonny had, but their biggest hits came after he was the guitar player.

My little high school band immediately started incorporating that and I started to try and come up with ‘What other kinds of music are like this?’ I knew Elvis was The King of Rock and Roll, so I bought the earliest Elvis stuff, which was The Sun Sessions, and that was a whole other door that opened up.

Then it was Little Richard and Gene Vincent, anything I could think of that was Rock and Roll - not just oldies - became my new obsession, and that started record digging and me becoming completely consumed with that music.

What made this song in particular so life altering for you?

That was the most life altering music because it really set my path forward of what I would eventually do professionally. My first record was as close to that music as I could try to get. I think in a way it set my music apart from what was happening in Americana radio at the time, and it gave me an audience.

If I hadn't been given that box set, I would never have come to the conclusion that this is what I loved about The Stooges and the Ramones, but it makes more sense for me. I can identify more with a kid from Lubbock, Texas than I can with four guys from Queens or somebody from Leeds, it became my thing.

BEST FIT: You’ve described this one as the song that most influences your production choices.

JD McPherson: There's not a session that I've been a part of that I haven't played that song for somebody for inspiration.

I love the Allen Toussaint produced Irma, it's perfect to me. I look at its place in history and to my knowledge nothing else sounded like that when it was being made. There's some secret magic in New Orleans with the way they record, the way they play, the way they sing and the way they write, that is so special.

Irma is my favorite singer and those are my favorite songs. If you go through my small catalogue, you're going to hear tubular bells, you're going to hear overly busy drums, and all of that stuff comes from hearing that song from Irma.

I got to see her on one of the last Plant Krauss tours. I got a message after the gig at Jazz Fest that we were going down to Preservation Hall and Robert might sing a song with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. I didn’t know that Irma was going to be there. She got up and played “It's Raining” with the Pres Hall Jazz Band and I was just bawling.

I couldn't believe I was getting to see this, because it was like seeing her in the ‘60s, it was one of the greatest performances I've ever seen. She was royalty to those people and to see her with the best possible band backing her was such a gift.

She's got a fascinating story. She was married twice by the time she was 19. She got her first break when she was a waitress when she was signed to a label after singing on a bar table, but she never got as big as, say, Aretha Franklin, which I’m baffled by, because her voice is incredible.

I think that has something to do with the isolated nature of New Orleans music. Obviously, some New Orleans music has leaked out, like Fats Domino, and becomes huge and massive, but for the most part New Orleans is almost like a walled off city.

Had she gone up to New York or she'd been from New York, it wouldn’t have been the same music. She's obviously beloved, and her music did make it out, but at the time I have the feeling that it was the nature of New Orleans. Not much gets in, not much gets out and they're fine with that.

There was that TV show Treme, where the DJ was interviewing Kermit (Ruffins), and that playing on an Elvis Costello record was on offer. He's like, ‘Don't you want to get out and see get the world? What do you want to do, smoke weed and play backyard barbecues the rest of your life?” And Kermit goes, “That’ll work.”

I asked Angel Olsen if it’s harder to write a song about being happy in love than a sad one, and she said it was, but the perfect example was Irma Thomas’s “Anyone Who Knows What Love is”. It's an absolutely beautiful song, you listen to it and you feel like you’re in love.

Yes, with the crazy production and with those little bells. Oh my God, that stuff just blows my mind. That's as good as pop music gets in my opinion.

BEST FIT: This has been your walk on song for the last 10 years, it’s a very short song which only gives you 54 seconds to get on stage.

JD McPherson: It works out perfectly. We just walk out, strap the guitars on and launch right in.

I thought so hard about the walk on music, because the obvious thing to do is to play something that gets people pumped up.

Lots of bands have used songs from movies. The Ramones walked out to the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I think Suede used to walk out to something from Gone With the Wind, some big cinematic thing, it was “The Ecstasy of Gold” for Metallica.

The first time I opened up for Robert's band, The Sensational Space Shifters, they walked out to “Rumble” by Link Wray. I've seen people walk out to “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” by The Stones, and all of these are wonderful choices.

I agonised over what to walk out to, such as ‘Do we walk out to something from the ‘50s?’ And then it hit me. I'm an art school kid, I got a Master of Fine Arts in really far out art things and I always wanted to convey some kind of avant-garde sensibility, even if people didn't understand that or pick up on that.

That little track that opens Monk's Music is an arrangement for saxophones, which immediately hinted at what I was into. But it's also a hymn. It's very meditative. It's a saxophone arrangement of a hymn.

The story of the hymn is really interesting, the lyric was written by the Scottish vicar and poet Henry Francis Lyte and two decades later the church musician William Henry Monk re-wrote the music.

All these little boxes were checked. For me, it was short to the point it sounds like you're graduating a little bit, so all of those things together turned that into the walk on song.

Monk doesn't actually play on it, but John Coltrane is in the brass section.

Yes, and it’s from my favorite Monk record. The only time we've ever deviated from it was when we played New Orleans once, and the iPod we carried around had malfunctioned.

This was before streaming, and the sound guy was like, ‘Is there anything else you want to walk out to?’ I had just heard “Pony” by Ginuwine, which was fantastic walk on music, but we eventually got our iPod working again, and it was back to Monk!

BEST FIT We’re finishing with your all-time favorite song ever.

JD McPherson: I know I'm always touting this badge of being a Rock and Roll person, and I am, I really do love it, but I’m also a really sentimental person, I have a real romantic side, and I tend to really geek out on 12/8 ballads. So I present to your readers the queen of all 12/8 ballads, which is “Love Letters” by Ketty Lester.

It's her finest moment and it's the perfect recording. The piano in that song is the greatest thing I've ever heard. The groove is fantastic. The lyric is saccharine, but not in a trite way. And it's in a David Lynch movie.

It’s in Blue Velvet, and soundtracks a very brutal scene.

It’s a scene where the police are raiding the drug den, there's guns going off, and a cop goes rolling across the street. Jeffrey is at Dorothy’s apartment and there’s blood coming out of his head. It’s very surreal but it's like there’s this beautiful thing underneath it.

That's something I never really thought about, that seeing David Lynch movies in high school really influenced my value system as art and music go. It's this ‘50s aesthetic, but it's turned on its ear a little bit.

What makes it your favourite song ever?

Sometimes I'll say “In My Room” by the Beach Boys is my other favorite song, and they're very similar, they're almost the same exact tempo. But “In My Room” is much more about this injured spirit that finds comfort in solitude, and “Love Letters” is much more outwardly directed.

There's been some really good versions of it. Elvis did it. Tom Jones did it. Allison Moyet did it, but man, I never get tired of hearing Ketty Lester’s version of it. What a tune, it’s brilliant.