"If you're thinking I don't seem like a big Van Halen guy, then you'd be right. I liked parts of what they did, but what this is really about is a moment in 2017. Whenever Spoon play, we'll go through the same process in the build-up to stage time. The clock is ticking, we're sipping tequila and we're blasting music, turning it up a little louder with each track. The tour manager comes in, tells us we've got five minutes, and then it's time to pick one last song before we go on. For a while, this was it. It got us going! It was Alex (Fischel) who picked it, I think. It's sort of a David Lee Roth mission statement; all those fucked up lyrics, ""my love is rotten to the core,"" and ""you're semi-good looking."" We've had other pump-up songs - it was 'I Wish' by Stevie Wonder for a while - but this is one of those ones that makes you appreciate the art of the riff. You have to write a lot of them before you land on one this good. It's pure '70S rock and roll. I feel like we need some more of that nowadays."

"I emigrated to Canada with my mother the year Mon oncle Antoine debuted, the same time that the U.S. was doing nuclear testing on Amchitka Island, off the coast of British Columbia. The FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) was flourishing. Canadian radio was given a mandate to stop playing American bubblegum round the clock. In this era of radical identity building, along came a candle-lit holiday fable set in an undertaker’s home in rural Quebec. The nephew of Antoine is a young boy coming of age in a world that no one outside his cloistered family could imagine. Mon oncle Antoine is about the sexual, material, and death’s-end taboos in a small village—and the taboo against anyone outside of it ever learning of such things. Some people puzzle over why this film keeps being called Canada’s finest decades after its release, when so many other artists have surpassed its modest ambitions. It is because of this: It was the beginning of saying, “We are not the back forty of the U.S.; we are not a trinket of the queen’s; our land and generations have given us a purchase of our own.” It was the beginning of remarkable Canadian filmmaking."