With ‘Gimme 5!’ we take a peek into the collections of artists we admire. The premise is simple: artists WE like share five records THEY love.

This Friday, Dandy Boy Records is dropping a Cleaners From Venus tribute compilation titled Tales of a Kitchen Porter, and it’s definitely one to get excited about. The line-up includes some incredible artists like Yae-Ming, Chime School, Flowertown, Whitney’s Playland, The Smashing Times, Owen Adair Kelley, and Sob Stories — the band fronted by today’s Gimme 5! guest, Joel Cusumano. We’ve already had a preview of a couple of tracks, and you can check them out below.

The upcoming release gave us the perfect excuse to chat with Joel and ask him to share five tracks that influenced his own songwriting. Joel is a talented guitarist with a style all his own, as you can hear in his past work with Cocktails, Razz, Talkies, and his current project, Sob Stories. He’s also an in-demand player, lending his guitar skills to R.E. Seraphin’s band and others. Beyond that, Joel has a keen ear for curation — his Odd Pop playlists are pure gold. If your daily soundtrack is feeling a bit stale, Joel’s eclectic taste will shake things up in all the right ways.

This Gimme 5! has been a long time coming, and we hope you enjoy diving into Joel’s picks and seeing how they’ve shaped his approach to songwriting as much as we have. He wraps things up by explaining his choice for the Cleaners From Venus track he covered with Sob Stories, which will be out this Friday. Pre-order your copy here!

1. John Cale || Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend (from 1974s Fear)
“Music is godlike. Creation ex nihilo, conjured from vibration. John Cale is some sort of trickster deity; luring you in with deceptively sweet melody and arrangement while smuggling in stories of violence, rape, and obsession in the lyrics. That tension of levity and darkness is really appealing to me as a songwriter. This song’s great paranoid druggy opening line recalls one of The Velvet Underground’s most notable songs: “Standing waiting for a man to show / Wide-eyed, one eye fixed on the door”.”

2. The Adverts || Cast of Thousands (from 1979s Cast Of Thousands)
“Around age 15, I dove headfirst into ’70s punk after buying the US version of The Clash’s first record at Sam Goody. I think I bought Highway 61 Revisited that day too. Anyways, The Adverts were a discovery of that era, but only later did I hear their second album, Cast of Thousands. I loved that early punk music wasn’t restricted to the strict power chord chugging that it became (though I still love those kinds of records). This album is in line with other punk bands’ sophomore albums that opened up their sound with different instrumentation, arrangement, rhythms, etc. If there’s a single guitar other than the one in the B section, I don’t hear it. The song’s condemnation of dehumanizing, sensationalist media is brilliant. The recording quality on Cast of Thousands notoriously “sounds bad”; but that’s wrong, it sounds perfect.”

3. The Church || Violet Town (from 1984s Persia)
“I got heavily into The Church a few years ago, having only previous known their US hit Under the Milky Way. On a trip to Venice the week of New Year’s Day 2019, I was listening to their first few records on repeat as I wandered the freezing streets. Venice was founded on a swamp by Roman refugees fleeing Attila the Hun’s army. It became one of the wealthiest cities of the Middle Ages, and, its glory days now long gone, is a romantic and haunting mausoleum of an ancient world. I don’t know what Violet Town is about, but for wandering the streets of Venice you couldn’t do better. The Church have a knack for evoking an impressionistic mood on their records, and this is one of their best tunes.”

4. Graham Parker || Love Without Greed (from 1980s The Up Escalator)
“I was and am a huge Elvis Costello fan, but age has helped me appreciate Graham Parker, from whom Costello controversially (may have) derived his early sound. I think it’s very easy to love them both. Parker’s songs cover comparable angry young man angst, but his language is clearer, more direct and more confrontational. And Brinsley Schwarz is a hell of a guitar player. Love Without Greed finds Parker mining rich territory — the transactional nature of love and the destructive power struggle that results. “He may get your kiss / and believe that it’s his / But you know baby I hit your heart / where the others only missed” — damn, wish I’d written that!”

5. Cleaners from Venus || Victoria Grey (from 1986s Living With Victoria Grey)
“When Bobby from Dandy Boy Records said he wanted Sob Stories to cover a Cleaners from Venus song for his upcoming tribute album, I immediately knew I wanted to do Victoria Grey. The jazzy chord progression in the verse is fantastic, and the post-chorus guitar tag is killer. I’m a bit of an Anglophile (could you tell by this list?), and this is one of the most distinctly British of Cleaners songs. A song about the specter of Queen Victoria that references the UK miners’ strike and Falklands War possibly sounds odd sung by an American. I hope we did it justice.”

Listen to Sob Stories’ version of the song below. Read our review of the compilation here.