"They famously reformed last year and I've seen them a couple of times and played on the same bill with them. One of my great regrets was that I came to this album a couple of years after it came out and my friends had all been to the show when they came through town and I missed it. It felt like a concert I should have been at. Part of it was that I hated guitar bands. In high school I was into terrible progressive rock like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes, while all my friends were into Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth. I always thought I was in the right and it was them who was barking up the wrong tree, which subsequently has made me a little bit embarrassed, because it was the 90s - I should've been listening to Sonic Youth. But I was firmly committed against guitar music and it was the same friends, like Ryan [Smith] - who's in my band now playing guitar and keyboards and other stuff, and who's been my friend since I was 11 or 12 - who was the guy in the Dinosaur Jr. T-shirt trying to get me to play organ chords in the background for his band, and I was grumbling away, ""When the fuck do I get my solo?"" And he introduced me to Neutral Milk Hotel. It's kind of an obvious way in for me, because it very much has that sound - the spiritual free jazz and the horns and the power and the instruments from around the world, different bagpipe kind of instruments - for me, it has that same spirit and wildness. It's also one of those albums, like the Pharoah Sanders, where the songs are all essentially the same song. And I don't mean that to diminish the achievement of this record because I think it's amazing, but when you have a record where you listen to the first song and the melody is so elemental to me - it's like it existed before this album was written - and then later on you hear another song and it's the same melody but inverted. Not in a technical sense, but you get the impression that these songs all come from the same tree and I love that. That's one of the things that the album format can do - tie things together like that. I've done that myself consciously on my records in the past - reprised a melody. On Our Love there are two songs that are essentially the same song revisited - 'All I Ever Need' and 'Your Love Will Set You Free'. Not the melody, but the underlying riff and the harmony."

"Number four is the documentary American Movie. The reason I like this movie so much is I’m a big fan of sort of vérité documentaries and, while this is not exactly a vérité documentary, it’s a movie from the late ’90s and it’s sort of the end of the 16mm personal documentary era. I suppose there are some that exist after that, but for the most part, as someone who really likes movies like Grey Gardens and Seventeen and all these great sort of authentic… Filmmakers went and experienced their experiences with their subjects. American Movie is really like the pinnacle of that for me in that it’s a movie that took two years to make and two years to edit. It’s the kind of movie where when you hear Chris Smith, the director, ask a question, you almost get excited because it’s like, “Oh, the guy from behind the camera is a part of the story also?” Or the boom dips in. It’s charming because you know they’ve been there for two years living with these people. The movie’s amazing because it’s an incredible critique on filmmaking that’s both funny and also sort of sentimental and inspiring in that the Murphy’s Law of filmmaking is that anything that can go wrong will go wrong and, you know, in the case of [subject] Mark Borchardt, it really does. But you’ve never seen someone more impassioned and more determined to sort of accomplish… I don’t know if I want to say something as silly as “their dreams,” but he’s dedicated to doing this and that. To me as a filmmaker or as someone who’s trying to do any sort of artistic endeavor, it’s really amazing to watch, and the movie is very sincere and very honest and very charming and very funny. It gives you an idea of, like, what to avoid when making movies, but it also gives you an idea of what movies are going to be very hard — I would say that making movies is very traumatic — and you’ve just sort of got to stick with it, and this movie is a great example of that. And it’s a great example of getting to know the characters personally, or the subjects personally, and it’s the kind of movie that, when it’s over, you feel like you know everybody in that movie. It’s incredibly charming and it’s one of those movies that I think, as a filmmaker or just a film fan in general, it’s a very essential movie to see. I always try to watch it or show it to people right before we make a movie to say, like, hopefully it won’t go like this."