“I think my singing has evolved on the new record but some of the songs are a bit more challenging to sing accurately every time, so I went through a phase of listening to my favourite singers. I revisited Nina Simone’s Live At Carnegie Hall album during the last five months I was making it, especially in the last half of the record when I was doing the more tedious stuff like the mixing. I was going through the phase of finishing the recording and preparing for the live shows pretty quickly after completing the record.

“I got this record when I was 15 or something. I grew up in a town called Redding and my family used to go to thrift stores a lot and I found this for like 25 cents. I knew who Nina Simone was - I hadn’t gone crazy into her discography - but I grew up in a house where I was exposed to a lot of cool things, so I was aware of her.

“I listened to that record obsessively and it’s such a brilliant performance the whole way through, it was her first solo performance at Carnegie Hall and it’s so crazy to imagine that. It was a bit of a personal sacrifice for the man who promoted it, because people thought she wasn’t going to be able to carry the show on her own, but she definitely does.

“‘Plain Gold Ring’ in particular is just really heavy and beautiful. I think the lyrics are amazing and her ability to translate sorrow is so adept. There’s also a lot of non-verbal singing - the whole beginning of the song is just a mournful vocal riff - and that style of singing has always resonated with me.

"There’s a joke that Nina Simone always performs the best version of any song she covers and that’s definitely true with this song.”

“Todd Rundgren’s from Philadelphia and he’s an amazing songwriter and producer, I’m a long-time fan and he’s got a very impressive body of work. I’ve always been very drawn to his classic era and his melodic inclination, there’s always these signature sounds in his songs and even in his later music you can tell it’s ‘a Todd song’.

“It was an interesting way that I came to him, because prior to me ever hearing Todd I was very into Laura Nyro. When I was 15 I got her album Eli and the Thirteenth Confession at the thrift store and I was obsessed with it. Years later I got into Todd and I was very struck by the melodic similarities between his work and Laura’s - it seemed too close to be a coincidence - so I did some research and it turned out that he was a huge Laura Nyro fan and it obviously influenced the way he wrote. That was interesting to me because I wouldn’t have assumed that, but it made sense why I liked both of their outputs so much.

“He’s made a lot of classic records and ‘Real Man’ is one of his later tunes that’s really fun. He’s great at writing songs that you want to singalong with, he’s such a great singer and writes such great parts.

“I always think about the lyrics to this song, because he was with the model Bebe Buell in the ‘70s and she had Steven Tyler’s child, which was Liv Tyler, and she was basically raised by Todd and Bebe. Liv considered Todd to be her father and she didn’t know about Steven Tyler until way later, so I think about Todd as a stand-up guy for doing that, it just makes me have respect for him.

“In this song he talks about forgetting about his body and being a real man, which is cool. It’s a song about not being selfish and doing what’s right. With ‘Real Man’, it’s one of those things where you come back to a song when you’re older and it resonates with you in a different way. I didn’t really know it super well until a couple of years ago, but it’s such a big banger. There’s a lot of nice instrumental touches in it too, Todd was a total studio wizard.”

“It’s funny, because I realised part way through compiling these songs that for some reason I was picking really long songs. It’s also one of those things where I’ve listened to this Robert Wyatt song so many times without maybe realising how long it was.

“Robert Wyatt is another favourite of mine, he’s a musical genius and he’s also a great poet and a very good lyricist. His voice is so interesting, I’m often fond of people with strange or weird voices and his voice is kind of androgynous, which I really like a lot. With English musicians there’s often a kind of a grappling with class issues, religion and oppression and I feel that comes through in his songs. In ‘Team Spirit’ he’s dealing with macho elements, where he’s sort of being rejected and coming to terms with that.

“I heard Robert Wyatt just by rabbit-holing my way through stuff. When I was a teenager I got into Kevin Ayres and I then learned about the Soft Machine and the Canterbury scene stuff, which Wyatt was a massive part of. That’s very interesting to me, because a lot of the music was very dreamlike and the melodies are very pleasant but they also make you feel uncomfortable, and that’s also a space I like to dwell in.”

“I met Jackson MacIntosh at a friend’s wedding in Joshua Tree in March of last year, he’s Canadian and we met through some other Canadian friends who live in Los Angeles. He plays in TOPS and Drugdealer and he’s a very active guy.

“He made this record My Dark Side last year and when we met him at the wedding he was like ‘Yeah, you know, I’ve made this stuff…’ and how many times have you met people who give you their stuff and you listen to it, but you just kind of get on with your life?

“I really liked the first track I heard, which was called ‘Lulu’ and I got into the whole album. He’s a fan of Todd Rundgren and you can hear that, similarly to Todd he’s great in the studio and he plays a lot of instruments, it’s a very classy, sophisticated sounding record.

“This song ‘Quotation’ is a favourite off the record and it’s such a succinct, memorable song. He’s super diverse and that’s one of the great things about the record, it’s also a short record which I appreciate, because I’m a fan of brevity. He kind of goes all over the place and he obviously listens to a lot of music.

“I contacted him after the wedding and said we’d been enjoying the record. I try and keep up with new things and there are people doing cool stuff for sure, but I can kind of slack on it sometimes and not keep up to date with it. There isn’t an endless list of new stuff I really like a lot, so I get really excited when I do hear something current that I really, really like.”

“This song is an interesting choice for this list, but I felt that sonically ‘Win’ somehow fit in with this mix of songs. It’s one of my favourite tracks on Young Americans, but it always seemed like a little bit of a sleeper track.

“I guess the lyrics are kind of cheesy and the whole album has been criticised as being a little hollow. I think it was a period of heavy drug use and it feels a little…, I don’t want to say soulless, because I don’t think Bowie is capable of that, but there’s a little bit of a disconnect and I don’t think he was in the best place.

“At the same time though, Young Americans was obviously a genius record and ‘Win’ is super sexy and strange. I’ve always liked the instrumentation and I used to stand in front of the stereo and sing along to it when I was a teenager.

“Young Americans wasn’t my favourite Bowie album, but it’s definitely great. I think at a certain point when you’re really deep into Bowie when you’re coming of age, you think about his albums less as individual records. You’re more absorbed in the whole thing - the person’s persona and their history.”

Quiet Signs is out now via City Slang. Jessica Pratt plays End of the Road Festival which runs from 29 August - 1 September.