Ash Costello: The 10 songs that changed my life

Sad songs and silliness? Welcome to the soundtrack to New Years Day vocalist Ash Costello's life!

“I remember being sat in a booster seat in the car and hearing this – I can recall it so vividly. My mom was driving and she was a huge Prince fan. My dad was more into stuff like Alice Cooper – he played the song Feed My Frankenstein a lot. The music I heard as a child was my first step towards discovering what I really loved.”

“This was my jam and I thought it was the coolest shit in the world! Michael Jackson was my favourite when I was a kid – I remember being totally captivated by him. He possessed almost superhuman qualities, like he was larger than life. He was a complete legend.”

“It was a high-school heartbreak and I was too young to understand it wasn’t a big deal. I’d listen to this song on my Walkman cassette player with my headphones in. I had my first kiss to How Soon Is Now?, so listening to it made me feel super sad. Whenever I felt down and wanted to live in that moment, I’d put that track on.”

“This was the first song we ever wrote. Now, it’s outdated because it sounds like that ’00s emo scene, but it really reflected what was going on. We were all in our van when we first heard it on the radio – we were in a parking lot in our hometown, waiting for it. When it came on, we all jumped around and screamed!”

“This took months to write, but when we finally completed it, it became my favourite song of ours for a long time. It was a really rough process to articulate my feelings.”

“I’ve probably heard this song a million times over now and I’ll always love it. How genius is it to have the words ‘I’m not okay’ as the hook? It’s like an anthem for everybody’s lives. Some of the lyrics are super specific, but, like, the overall idea applies to pretty much everybody, and, well, I’m totally not okay.”

“Whenever we put a new song in the set, that immediately becomes my favourite to play, just because it sounds fresh. The reaction to it has been great. We started playing it before we released the single, and it was the first time in New Years Day’s history that I’d seen kids singing the words of a song before they’d heard a recording. With Disgust Me, you hear the chorus once and it’s immediately stuck in your head. I’m really proud of that.”

“We worked on it with Chris from Motionless In White, and it really put New Years Day on the map. To this day, it’s a huge song in our scene and I’m proud to have produced something that’s had an impact like that, because it doesn’t happen often. Bands can write good songs, but they don’t always make an impression. Chris and I singing together mixed well with the concept of the video to produce the tastiest fucking combo. It just worked.”

“It’s just hit me that if people were coming to my funeral they would expect to hear Thriller. If I could pre-plan the whole thing then I’d hire dancers to entertain everyone by doing the famous Thriller dance down the aisles. It would be so much fun! I don’t take many things in life seriously, so why would I treat my funeral any differently? I was thinking about saying something depressing like Guns N’ Roses’ November Rain, or something really cheesy like a Bruno Mars song, but it has to be Michael Jackson.”