Pixies and Sonic Youth were so important to the eighties.
Definitely one of the biggest influences on my music is the music that Ben Gibbard's associated with, so Death Cab and The Postal Service.
Actually, the most entitled people I've met are indie rockers and indie actors, because they really believe their press.
Maybe it's the way that I do music, but I was never in a cool indie band or hung out with all the cool arty kids when I came to London.
In the early and mid 1990s, every musician I knew was obsessed with Helium. The 'Pirate Prude' EP and 'Pat's Trick' played on repeat at nearly every gathering I attended. And we didn't just listen to these records - we discussed them, the worlds they opened, novelistic and strange.
It's American Alternative radio stations that bug me. We're considered Alternative, but don't expect us to be played next to Blink 182 and Offspring. We're hardly of that generation.
The band Grizzly Bear, I think they're excellent. There's a beauty and a musicality there that I wish would have been in vogue in the late '80s, when I was forming bands.
I'm not so interested in being indie just for the sake of being indie.
I kinda learned to sing singing to Echo and the Bunnymen songs and Smiths songs: Morrissey would be a big favorite.
With the Stone Roses, I always thought we'd be successful because we had some great songs.
In everything I do, my principal inspiration is the 1996 Belle & Sebastian album 'If You're Feeling Sinister.'
From the outside, some people might consider me a hipster!
I'm about to go to Sundance for my 3rd year, and Sundance has never felt like a real independent festival at all. On the other hand, it might to start feel that way.
I'm finding out what part of punk culture or white indie culture I actually still want to hold onto - What are the values? What are the contributions that I actually like? - and it not coming from a place of desperation or wanting to be embraced or wanting approval, essentially.
I kind of grew up in the indie world, and now that sort of writing and material is on television.
I gave away 'Life in Hell' when it was a little 'zine, and sold it at record stores for $1, and I knew from the time that I first did it that I would continue to do it, because it was fun.
I remember the first album I really completely geeked out over was The Shins' 'Wincing The Night Away.' That album was everything to me.
Everybody knows the story of The Smiths. You can still go and see Morrissey.
I turned so many people on to The Smiths before they got huge.
When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band - or at least in a Pixies cover band.
No one goes to BrooklynVegan to read about content, they just go for drama. It's a tabloid, the scum of indie.
The word 'indie' is meaningless now. It's so over-used that people think it simply means green hair.
I love Modest Mouse.
For a decade, Emma-Lee Moss has been steadily making weird, moody, melancholic music under the moniker 'Emmy the Great' that has been referred to as nue-folk, anti-folk, synthpop, and, most of all, literary.
I'm just not a big fan of the too-cool-for-school indie world. Metal bands have never been invited or been able to be part of the cool kids, and I like it that way.
