"Getting a little more progressive now, the whole math / metalcore thing of the late 90s, especially around Boston, was very much my thing at the time. Botch were a little more left field, geographically, and musically, but I still think this is probably the best album of that genre and era. I saw them a bunch of times when they were touring this and they were always totally fucking incredible."

"The third choice is a song from Boston, from the band Boston, called "Peace of Mind". And it’s not my all-time favorite song. It’s just one day many years ago, I was in the garage of my apartment, wrenching on my pickup truck, one Sunday night. And there used to be a popular syndicated show, I think it was called Rock Line, and they would get these musicians on and they would talk about their music and their songs. Not too much differently from what we’re doing now. And they had the guy from Boston on, and they said, "What is 'Peace of Mind?' What was that song about?" And the guy said, "I had a good job. I worked for IBM. I had things. You know, I had medical and dental, but I didn’t have peace of mind. I wanted to play music. So I quit my job, and I started this band. And I threw all caution to the wind, and I decided to roll the dice, and give it a try." I was sitting in my garage, when I was like 23, working on my pickup truck thinking, “Do I want to do construction forever? Or maybe I want to give comedy a try.” And it was sort of at that moment, I decided to do comedy. Now, I didn’t make a nickel for the next decade, but at a certain point it worked out."

"I first read it because it was on sale for a quarter in a bookstore in Penn Station. I thought it was going to be something like the Albee play. I read it on the train to Boston, and I felt that the prose had broken one of my ribs: it was so powerful. I had been a poet until then, not thinking of writing fiction and “Mrs. Dalloway,” let me know you could do in fiction what I wanted to do in poetry."

"My parents got divorced when I was about eight, and after that I moved with my mother from St. Louis to Boston. I became her movie pal, and she would take me to some very inappropriate movies! This was one of them. The Graduate has one of my favorite montages ever—that one where Dustin Hoffman jumps off a diving board and lands on Anne Bancroft’s chest! It’s sexy and beautiful, but it also captures how this young man spirals into a state of jadedness over the course of a summer."