"I will give you Unfinished Piece for the Player Piano. Oh, it’s a great movie. It’s a Russian movie; [Nikita] Mikhalkov is the director, and it’s a Checkhov play, really — it’s based on Platonov. Chekhov is unbelievably difficult to do, to capture the mood, to capture the humor, the incredible sadness and pathos of the characters, all that. It’s very rare that you see a great production of Checkhov. I saw this when I was rehearsing a production of The Cherry Orchard. The great British director Peter Brook was directing, and he set up a screening of this movie for us. It’s just, it’s also a beautiful movie to look at, and also it was a great director, but it’s the characters, both the acting and the depiction of this wonderful, very specific group of Russian characters is unmatched."

"Charles Laughton plays an English butler whose British lord loses him in a poker game to a cowboy from Red Gap, Washington. Ruggles is the butler, a manservant, and he’s forced to move to America, and this cowboy doesn’t [Heaton goes into cowboy twang] feel comfortable having a manservant because it’s ‘Merica and every man is his own man and we have freedom. He tries to help Ruggles become a free man and Ruggles’ family’s whole tradition was being menservants to people. He finds it very hard to embrace American freedom. It has really funny, terrific, and moving performances, and not very many people watch it — or have even seen it or heard of it. I make my boys watch it every Thanksgiving. I’m like, “Boys, it’s that tiiiime!” and they’re like, “Noooooooo, not Ruggles.” but I think they’ll come to appreciate it."

"I played British and Irish folk in an early band I had. We only performed one show and Rostam [Batmanglij, Vampire Weekend multi-instrumentalist] was also in the group, so this was the roots of Vampire Weekend. We covered 'Matty Groves' from this album. It's a traditional song about adultery, anger and sex, and I thought it was cool that they could take ancient-sounding stories and make them relevant. It's an important lesson – if you want to reinvent the wheel, maybe pop music isn't for you. As much as it's about being progressive, it's also rooted in a certain respect for the form. Which might seem paradoxical, but that's what pop music is – it combines very old ideas with very new sounds. Fairport are an example of that, taking very old songs in the English language and reinventing them."