Rather than underground icons, you tip your hat to Tina Turner, Otis Redding and Jeff Buckley. Why was it important for you to do
that? For no other reason than their stories happened to be resonating with me at the time of writing the record.
I was spending a lot of time in Memphis writing this album, so stories about those artists were everywhere I looked. Their lives play out like movies in my mind. Tina driving down Highway 61, Otis Redding in a plane crash, Buckley drowning in the Mississippi River the night before he was supposed to record his next record. Also, as I get further along in my thirties, the fact that people like Otis Redding or Jeff Buckley passed away so young, but left such influential and timeless work, is fascinating.