Canada's Devin Townsend recently sat down with Metal Hammer and picked the 10 songs that he believes defined his career. Following is an excerpt from the rundown.

"Fake Punk" (Punky Brüster – Cooked on Phonics, 1996)

Townsend: “I wrote 'Fake Punk' while I was in The Wildhearts. I wrote it with Kev (Papworth), who played in Lawnmower Deth and was our guitar tech at the time. I loved punk music and grew up with a lot of it, but I was never a punk. I could do sweep appregios and did well in school, you know? As much as I loved the scene, I was never legit so I could pull from personal experience and say ‘I’m a fake punk, but so are you guys’. There was this whole notion that to get anywhere you had to be bug-eyed, jump-around, 3/4 punk. The guys that were doing all of that were the same guys who’d been dressing as Nirvana three years before and dressing like Motley Crue before that. It was all just aesthetics.”

"Deadhead" (Devin Townsend Band - Accelerated Evolution, 2003)

Townsend: "When I was young, I thought love was passion, or sex, or romance. But after a while, biologically, that infatuation fades and I thought when the passion was gone that meant the love was gone. It wasn’t until I experienced loss that I realised love is much more brutal. To love somebody, especially your kids, you have to accept that everything dies. Love includes the awareness that death is inevitable and when I was younger I was terrified of that. I was in pursuit of passion all the time, so Deadhead is a song about selfishness, about hurting people so you can just pursue that passion. What’s really incredible about love is that you have to be there, be around incredible amounts of suffering in order for you to really recognise what it is. It's not the hallmark card stuff!”

Check out Townsend's complete list here.