Julia Holter's Favourite Albums

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"I listened to Joni so much when I was like 15, and later also. Is this one my favourite? I don't know. Probably. I love For The Roses and I love The Hissing Of Summer Lawns. But Court And Spark is also a little… rock? Not rock, but it's very '70s. When I first heard it, it sounded grossly '70s in an uncool way. When I was in high school, it was a new sound for me and for a while it almost wasn't something I would be comfortable saying that I was into. It was folky vibes and '60s stuff that was cool.

It's slightly jazzy, slightly funky and those sounds began to actually be very exciting for me despite what everyone else might have thought. The songs are very relatable for someone of that age, even though they were written by an older person. You take a song like 'People's Parties' and the psychologies and the stories within the songs: it's fascinating to me. "

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"I just love that record. It was so beautifully done on every level - the arrangements are really incredible. Her writing, the storytelling is wonderful - she captures these scenes. She has a very casual way of expressing herself and it's very romantic: romantic in a literary way, like the romantic writers. She uses these long descriptions and paints a picture really well. But I think what really got me was the arrangements. The arrangements are so incredible, they're so economical; every instrument comes in when it's needed and then steps away.

The texture is always changing. You know how arrangements can be kinda blocky? That's never the case here. I think she worked on them with Ryan Francesconi. They're sometimes very sparse, the percussion is incredible. I don't know how to explain it… I don't know, even the packaging is beautiful. Yeah. Love it."

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"I love her music. I toured with her a little bit a few years ago. This album came out after we did that. It's just really beautiful and haunting. There are so many people in the world making songs but there are only a few people doing it so that it all blends together as well as it does here. It doesn't happen that much. Sometimes it's sort of pleasantly off or weird or sometimes it's just awkward but most of the time it's just really boring. But she just does this great job of making it seem effortless and dreamlike and strange. I don't know, it's just really good.

The lyrics: sometimes you don't quite hear them but then you do. The harmonies are so great. And she does something that I think I do too: she works with the timbre aspect of the music to affect her enunciation, and that has a lot to do with the success of it. She's moulding the shape of her mouth, almost, to get the sounds that she does. She's choosing to enunciate in this very particular way that is to do with harmonics and that sort of thing. I guess the difference with me maybe is that I'm not so good at having a distinct voice that is consistent throughout my songs; I have trouble with that. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, it's just a different approach. But she's really good at maintaining this consistent voice and I love that.

And she has a style, too. You know, like, fashion-wise? I just really think that's cool when you have a distinct style. That's classic. That's something I think is really fun. I like it a lot. And all that reflects in her music - there's this whole vibe. "

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"I got into M.I.A. at a really weird time. I got into her just two years ago. I mean, I first heard her years ago and I thought it was really cool and interesting but I didn't really pay proper attention. But then I listened again two years ago and I listened to her new record and I was like, "Yeah, whatever", but I played it some more and I got really obsessed with it. She always maintains this incredible delivery. I guess she's rapping but to me it's the same as singing. Again, it's about moulding your voice to get the sound you want. Rappers do that a lot.

I just like it and I don't have a real explanation as to why. I just think it's really good. She's an original and has a unique perspective. I went back to her other records and so I explored her in a way that I hadn't done with any other artist in years. I was on tour and it was just somehow helpful for me at that time. It added some life to my world. "

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"I only heard about Parallelograms when I was asked to participate in a show that was her first performance ever in 2008. I didn't know her music and I just went into it learning the song 'Delicious'. It was pretty different to hers. I met her and talked to her briefly and we stayed in touch. Then later she came over to my place and it turned out she was writing again. She's a full-time dental hygienist now and she doesn't have a lot of time so it was useful for her to have another musician to work with.

What I love about this record is the incredible arrangements - instruments are just there when you need them. They were done by Leonard Rosenman who's a pretty well known film composer. He was trying to become a producer and here you can hear what a delicate sensibility he has for timbre and tone. Linda had a huge role in that - I mean, she's not always delicate. But there is so much range and texture and dynamic. The songs are beautiful and the songs are incredible. Everything is done right, just so right, and done for the right reasons - for the love of music, clearly."

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"When I first heard Ariel Pink, I was very homesick for LA and was kind of depressed and miserable in the Midwest, which I love, I should add. It had nothing to with the Midwest: it was just the circumstances. This record was one of many things that reminded me that I needed to come back home to LA. There was something about the sound, the love for moving around, both physically and within the music, the sense that you could go wherever you wanted to go in terms of melodies and harmonies. I totally related to the freedom, the crazy characters that are in the songs. I had started recording and I found myself really interested in his passion for building characters in songs. I love his music to this day because he does that so well. Again, it was important for me at a particular time and it continues to be."

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"Was it their first album? I don't even know. This and Court And Spark were both records that my parents played when I was young, and I hated. But they didn't play either album that much. My parents are really great but they didn't play them obsessively; they would play favourite songs or pick selections. I listened to this properly when I was maybe 21. It was exciting and dramatic and glamorous. There were these moments, like oboe solos and stuff, that were almost hippy-ish, but they worked so well within the music. I don't know if 'hippy-ish' is the word but I was really into this idea of the instruments going wild and going crazy. An oboe: so cool and weird and a unique combination of timbres. Then, of course, there's the romantic quality of Bryan Ferry's voice, which is why I also love his solo music. And the later Roxy Music, I love also, which everyone thinks is bad but - no, they don't! A lot of people love it. It surprises me that he wrote all the songs on this album. I never knew that. "

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"I'm still learning about Alice Coltrane; I can't really claim to know a lot about her. I've heard a lot of music from her - she did a lot of different things - but this is the first of hers that I really listened to. The first time I heard her, I was performing on this all-night radio show in LA and it took place in a church. After I'd performed, I lay down on this pew to sleep and the DJ played this record and I woke up and it just really hit me. It was the track 'Yamuna Tira Vihari' and I was like, "Oh my god". It was so immersive and a flood of light, and so ecstatic. I can hardly explain. I was delirious, almost. There were all these strings and an organ, I think, and then her voice chanting and it's so insane.

I listen to it a lot. It's spiritual, I think - and I don't know anything about that aspect of it - but I listen to a lot of music in that way. I listen to a lot of early music and Renaissance music, a lot of choral stuff. You know that this is a spiritual record and you almost don't need to know about that aspect of it. It just gets you. But I think that's okay, I think you can do that."

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"I went to music school and this piece is probably given to every music student as a main example of what medieval music is, so it's not obscure in that world. It's almost funny that I'm putting it in here but I do love Machaut. To me, he's probably more notable for having written these secular love songs, which was pretty cool for that period. But I chose this piece because it's so powerful in an obvious way, just sonically, and what's cool about this performance is that they have these inflections in the voices which they think, I guess, is authentic. But I think that's debatable. It might be true, I'm not really sure. The singers bend the notes: they sing in kind of straight tones and then they bend the notes in a way that you don't really hear in other performances of this piece. It just sounds incredible, authentic or not. There are revolutionary things about this piece and why it's important but I don't remember what they are. When I was writing my song 'Marienbad', I was into madrigals and that straight-tone singing with lots of different voices "

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"Robert Ashley is famous for having made these so-called operas, a lot of them were for TV. He works with the voice in these really great ways. I love this record because you don't know exactly what's going on: there's a lot of mystery. You have to piece together what's going on within the minutiae of the musical environment. Or you don't and you just listen and enjoy it. The sounds are very beautiful. Ther's a distant organ in the background just playing this one chord and you can also hear a bass. You can hear this woman whispering in French but you can barely hear her. Then this male singer appears but there's some crazy modulation on his voice. So all these crazy elements combine to create this crazy environment that you want to listen to for maybe ten minutes, because it's not like a song but it's got the elements of a song: you've got a bassline, you've got these instruments playing harmonies and you have voices. But you can't tell what's going on. It has an atmosphere. The album is called Automatic Writing but the track I'm talking about here, specifically, is called 'Automatic Writing'. It's important for me because it reinforced this idea that you could put beauty into music without necessarily using sweet melodies or whatever. I do have that in my music, but I also like the drama that can come from just… voices."

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"I only heard this for the first time about six years ago. It was just like this culmination of melody… like the way he… Why do I love it? I don't know. What I love about his music is the playfulness, the way he plays with words, his sense of humour. There's no clear obvious harmony, no clear obvious arrangements. It's very individual: it doesn't sound like a particular style. It has, actually, a little bit of a jazz style, because he was coming out of jazz: that was his love. It's like he's this poet who's finding the music that will fit for each song. It's kind of how I approach my music, too. You're not looking at it like, "This song is going to be this kind of song"; it's more like: "This song is about this and so maybe I'll make these sounds with it." It's a much more playful approach to music. I like that. I identify with that a lot. "

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"This was really important to me as a teenager. I was 15 and my friend put these headphones on me - I think I've talked about this in other interviews. It's embarrassing because I always say the same thing. But anyway he put these headphones on me and he had Live-Evil on his Walkman, and it just blew my mind. It was this culmination of wild instruments. It was just the funkiness, the wildness - it was all so beautiful. There was crazy trumpet on top of funky bass. I had never heard Miles Davis before so it was a crazy thing to hear for the first time. It really inspired my sense of exploration. I was listening to avant-garde classical music - which I never listen to anymore - and I was really interested in dissonance and wildness. So this seemed to be about letting yourself go and not worrying about, or being restricted by, style."