“You know what’s funny? I do drag for a living, but the most played songs on my iPod or whatever are not drag songs. I do love house and dance music from DJing, but that’s a different thing, I really love good songwriting and Aimee Mann, she’s one of the best songwriters of our generation.

“I was at lunch with Michelle Branch two weeks ago. She’s on my next album on a track called “White Rabbit” and when she heard the song for the first time, she said it reminded her of Aimee Mann and I was like ‘oh my god, that’s the biggest compliment ever.’

“I think Aimee Mann is a wizard with lyrics and melodies, she is so fucking good. Her writing really reminds me of Fountains of Wayne, which ironically kind of makes sense considering they’re two of my favourite bands of all time.

“That song “Charmer” is so beautiful. It has guitar pieces that are doubled, there’s a guitar melody which is doubled with a keyboard melody and it’s doubled with humming and it’s got these nice, fat chugging power chords. It’s basically about the type of person who thinks they can put on the charm, talk their way out of anything and that the world revolves around them. It’s very condescending.

“She’s like ‘when you’re a charmer, the apples fall’ and everything’s perfect for you, but she’s also right. People who are really hot, or people who are really rich or really famous or whatever, are really charming and everything just happens for them. It’s frustrating to know people like that, and people like that are often monsters, so I just love that song.

“I don’t know where I was when I first heard it, but I was like ‘this song is fucking lit,’ then again it’s Aimee Mann and it was so hard for me to pick one song from an artist like Aimee Mann. Her song “Rollercoasters’ and that album Mental Illness which came out four or five years ago and won Folk Album of the Year at The GRAMMYs, I listened to that album top to bottom every night in bed, when I went to sleep, probably every day for three years.

“I just did a comedy show with Fred Armisen, who knows her really well, and I told him 'I know you know Aimee Mann and I’m so jealous because she is like my Beyoncé.' She really is everything and she loves comedy, she loves stand-up, so I hope that someday I get to meet her, because I just lose my mind for her.

“The video is amazing too. It’s her saying she’s been overwhelmed, she sees an ad in the paper which asks ‘Are you overwhelmed? Get help today’ and she orders Laura Linney, who plays a robot of her. She trains the robot of herself to play guitar, do signings etc and then the robot starts to do it so well it takes over her life. That whole music video reminds me of how exhausting this can all be sometimes, but you take it for granted, because it’s also magical. So, in the music video she learns not to take her life for granted.

“The way she writes, all the words are perfect and they make sense. I love her singing. All the metaphors used in that song – it’s very condescending and patronising. There's a lyric where she's like “you're quite the little collector” – that’s so rude, you know? The whole song is basically saying 'You think you're really great, don’t you?' And I love that.”

“Clueless is my favourite movie of all time. I just think of myself when I was six or seven years old, watching Clueless and watching Alicia Silverstone flip her hair and draw lipstick on that mirror. You gotta understand that I grew up in rural, rural Wisconsin in a trailer, and this movie is about this perfect sweet teen girl in Beverly Hills. I found that everything about that movie is like a magic trick every time I watched it. I couldn’t blink.

“That song will always make me think of when I was a chubby, gross, gay little kid from the woods, literally the woods. I don’t know what it was about her, I felt like I wanted to be her, because I had no business entertaining the idea that I was anything like this person. It’s one of my favourite movies because it’s one of the only movies where the main character is rich and beautiful and a good person. When we were younger and we were really broke, I would just assume that everyone rich was horrible, but to assume that everyone rich is horrible and everyone who is broke is nice? It's just not fucking true.

“There’s obviously some lyrics in this song that I think are hilarious, that are maybe a little offensive. Like when she says ‘I’m not going to eat today, I’m not going to eat tomorrow, I’m going to be a supermodel,’ but as someone who is not very good with food myself I need that sort of inspiration. On this tour between Katya and all the dancers I am the biggest one on stage every single night. I just don't have a great metabolism, everybody in my family is big. It takes a lot for me to stick to it, I have to work out constantly and be careful with everything I eat just to stay mildly thin.

“It's a joke about how people in magazines appear to not eat. This wasn’t an earnest plea for help from the singer Jill Sobule. I’ve always wanted to cover this song too, so I hope someday I can cover this song.”

“I love The Donnas, but the problem with The Donnas is that they aren’t together anymore, so when you love a band that’s not together you run out of music. I love “Take It Off”, I love the whole Gold Medal album and I love so many of their records top to bottom, “Get Rid of That Girl” was so good, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Machine”. There are so many good songs, but I love that song “Friends Of Mine” the most.

"It starts with that rolling guitar riff. I love the singer’s voice, and it’s a great guitar solo and such a great sound overall. I don’t have a deep relationship with every one of these songs, some of them are ones that I have loved for years, but every time I hear this it’s a banger.

“There was something about me seeing girls playing instruments as a little gay boy that really spoke to me. I remember I was working in Provincetown, I was single and it was my first summer doing stand up. I heard this song while I was on a treadmill and I was like 'Oh my god, this song is so good.' It was so catchy. But I think the drummer had issues playing the drums, with physical pain, and the singer went to college.

“With guitars around that time and in 2004 when I started playing guitar, it was so male, but all of a sudden you had people like Michelle Branch, Sheryl Crow, Avril Lavigne and The Donnas show up. All these women playing guitars suddenly really changed the scope of things, and I wanted to try that.”

“I don’t why, but I was at an age where this person’s music made me ask 'Who writes this stuff? Who decides what the singer sings?' I guess I’d never really thought about it that much and then something about the writing, and the fact that the person might write and play their own instrument at the same time – it totally changed everything for me. I never really cared about wanting to be a singer or a guitar player, but I always wanted to be a songwriter and I thought 'That’s the trick here, there is somebody who writes all this stuff.'

“When I heard “Goodbye to You” for the first time I thought it was so beautiful. I asked Michelle how she figured out how to write this shit and she said she felt like she was almost downloading the songs from somewhere else. She was more like a vessel. She just re-recorded that album for the 20th anniversary, and she was saying it made her wonder how she had so many good ideas when she was so young.

“I learned to play guitar around the time of listening to these songs, so the way she played and the way the songs are built structurally had a big impact on the way I started playing guitar. She writes music like The Beatles – verse, chorus, verse, chorus, and that’s the way I learned to write music.

What’s it like having such an influential figure from your own musical journey be a part of your new record?

“Surreal! First of all, I must have been a little drunk or something to have the guts to say 'Hey, here’s a demo of a song I wrote, do you wanna be on it?' She said it sounded like this Aimee Mann song she liked and that she’d do it. It really wasn’t written as a duet, but I wanted her on it because I thought it sounded a little like older Michelle Branch music and I could really hear her on this. It was so crazy. I wanted her to be in the music video, but she just had a baby a couple of weeks ago, a newborn, so she couldn’t do it.

“Goodbye to You” was the lightbulb, it was the song that turned on the light bulb that someone writes music, and that I want to record music.”