“My Mom had actually briefly lived in Manchester in the late ‘70s, working for a Ska label and both my parents were involved in New York's punk scene, so I grew up listening to a lot of Ska. The Specials in particular are a band that I still love a lot.

“I love Ska to such an extent that my AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) screen name until they shut it down at the end of last year was ‘Skaloha 78’! I love this song and I had all of those two-tone compilations on CD. The first band I was in was definitely influenced by the genre and I wore all the checkerboard stuff.

“The song "Oops…!" on Haunted Painting is the most influenced by Ska in terms of anything I’ve written in a long time, especially in terms of the accenting guitars. I don’t think it would have worked as a Speedy Ortiz song, because my bandmates would have called me out for being ‘too ska’, but since is this my own project I can do whatever I like!”

“I wouldn't say I'm an active classical music listener. However, a really big formative thing for me growing up is that I sang in choirs and I was in a professional children's choir for many years of my pre-teen and teen years.

“We did a lot of what you could say is ‘difficult music’, and certainly there was a lot of 20th century composers and dissonant, strange time signature changes. Over time my ear had become very attuned to clashing things, or just a strangeness and time shifts. I think that’s probably true for a lot of people.

“I think that a lot of the stuff I try to write on guitar or synth is probably. and to my own detriment, overly complicated, but I can't help it. I grew up participating in and learning wacky, 20-part choir music. It's very hard to break out of that mindset or write a chord change with a vocal melody on top. In my head I think ‘OK, so when are the 19 other counter melodies happening?’

“I actually wound up missing a lot of school because of touring with this choir. My first time touring internationally was singing in this group with a bunch of kids, so not only did it inform how I write music, but I was used to sleeping on people's floors and couches, because that's what the choir would do. They would send two or three kids off to a different family and that's where you were for the night. A lot of musicians find touring to be hard work, so I’m glad I got the groundwork in early.

“I keep remembering songs that I had to sing in children's choirs, so I have had this one stuck in my head for two months! I’m blown away that this is music I sang as a child because it's so intense.”

“I think I picked this one as kind of a 'self own'. After getting into Letters to Cleo and starting to play guitar, there was a period of time when I was fine with misogyny in music. I think partly at the age 13 to 14, I was trying to establish myself as just as serious about the guitar as the few boys in my school who were playing. I think with a lot of music I totally either overlooked lyrics that were violent to women, or I was like ‘Oh, that's so cool. Like, he's murdering this girl in the bathtub.'

“I think probably on reflection Chino Moreno feels similarly about some of these lyrics, so I wouldn't put it all on Deftones. There's plenty of rock bands that I loved at this time that I don't think had any awareness of social inequalities, and certainly weren't as formative or interesting for me in terms of their production. The way Deftones records sound is still so, so cool to me and something I think about when making songs. If I hear a new band and I think there's any Deftones influence, I'm usually really psyched.

“That's part of why I picked this song in particular. If we're talking about stuff that formed me, there was a big stretch of years as a teenager where I probably had a lot of internalised misogyny, just from listening to rock bands that sounded awesome.

"Then again, I also watch a lot of True Crime stuff that has inequalities to all kinds of genders. I think of it like, we're all growing and acknowledging our mistakes, and things that were misogynistic in the past. It’s been 20 years since White Pony came out, and for the most part people aren’t writing this way anymore and people understand why lyrics like that can be hurtful.

“One of my favorite things that has happened is Devin McKnight, who used to be in Speedy and is now in the band Monica, and I went to see Deftones together and somehow we were standing in a side stage balcony. Chino Moreno locked eyes with Devin and then locked eyes with me like, one to the next! We have really bonded over our Nu Metal past. So, the bottom line is, White Pony is sick!”

“I was a big fan of the band Helium that Mary Timothy fronted in the ‘90s, which made me eventually get into her solo music. There’s definitely a heavy, medieval quality to it and I often imagine that this is what a lute player in a courtyard would play. I think that it's very cool that she was able to pull some of these early guitar music sounds and bring them into something that's so highly produced.

“Mary and I are friends now, but for a long time she was my number one guitar hero. The main thing I identified with looking up to her was the notion that we both love to do weird, crazy guitar solos, as well as the fact that she was the first woman that I saw playing incredibly difficult guitar music. She's one of the most inventive players not only that I've listened to, but that I've seen perform, and this record in particular is just really astounding to me.

“I wasn't always obsessively reading the credits of music to see who worked on things, but I remember looking at this and realising that Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse had been a part of this album and thinking that was so cool.

“Listening to this album and realising that the people who'd worked on it as well as other things at that time, kind of put it into my head that ‘Oh, all these little bands that you like, they know each other’. That was a perspective shift for me, not that I was ever writing or recording music in an outer bubble, but I started to become more aware of where I fit in with my own friends’ bands and how we might be able to work together on stuff.”

"Sammus is on Don Giovanni Records, which is another similar thing where a lot of the artists are all friends with each other on that label. Joe Steinhardt, who runs the label, told me I HAD to see her.

“I cried during her performance, which is weird because I’m not a big crier and I’m certainly not a big show crier. We got put in touch right as I was working on my first Sad13 record. Similarly, Enongo, who does the project, produces her own music and does everything. I managed to get her to do a verse on the first Sad13 record. We've toured together a bunch in both projects and it was one of the first times that I realised, 'Oh, I can just reach out to an artist that I like and we can work on something together.'

“Something that's become important to me as I've gotten older is that if we talk about women being underrepresented in guitar, it's no contest with women in audio engineering and production. The last statistic I checked, non-men comprise 2% of audio engineers, so the fact that I have this little circle of friends now, who produce their own music and can help each other when there's a question about Ableton, or what interface to purchase.

“Becoming friends with Enongo of Sammus was when I started to care more and started to view myself more in that light. It made me realise it was important to talk about those things publicly, so that perhaps other girls, or kids who are non-binary, can see that it's not just people who look identical to Steve Albini that are working in recording studios and producing themselves. So she's a real hero to me.

“I fucking don't know why I keep asking her to come on tour with me, because I will cry. There’s this one song of hers that gets me every time, but I’m not gonna say it. I don't want to make your readers cry.”

Haunted Painting is released 25 September via Wax Nine