"Yes, that's the one. I know both recordings, and the movie too, but I think the one I listened to mostly was the later one. In a lot of ways Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, and this piece in particular, represent what I'd ultimately like to do as an artist: bringing opera together with popular music; classical singing with everyday life. I've written a couple of operas, I've worked with Shakespeare's sonnets, I've made pop records, and I have this folk background, and I feel that Kurt Weill with The Threepenny Opera was the pinnacle where all of the elements that he was influenced by joined together to create this other animal. Lotte Lenya was the one who interpreted that. It's a really good touchstone to keep in mind in terms of what I do in the pop world and the theatre world."

"As much as I love this film and have seen it hundreds of times, I feel like I never TRULY saw it before looking at this remastered DVD! Such beautiful black and white! Every character in this film is a feast for an actor to play . . . even the maid (Jean Dixon) is rich with her own cynicism and longings. The chemistry between William Powell and Carole Lombard is something seldom glimpsed these days. And yet their romance had long before this film bloomed, gone to marriage and divorce. But the couple remained the closest of friends and the warm feeling between them is brimming in every single frame of the film. The DVD also includes the Lux Radio Theater broadcast, and there are some really fun outtake bloopers with Eugene Pallette—LOVE HIM—and Powell and Lombard."

"Set in Reykjavík at the turn of the 20th century this novel has a Chaplin-esque quality in its celebration of how the good values of society are to be found among those clinging to its lowest rung. Álfgrímur is an orphan living with an old couple who have opened their small farm to the misfits and the meek. A nearby graveyard becomes the boy’s playground, and it is there he is discovered to have “the pure tone” while singing at funerals of the lost and lonesome. From their gravesides he goes into the world to become a singer. It is my favorite book by Laxness, not least because it is his attempt to understand why someone like himself, born in a town of 10,000 people, found the right melody to transform the stories of a small world into world literature."