"You know, what’s touched me I think is GoodFellas… It’s a very real movie. GoodFellas is really some deep stuff. It was very good. It was believable. It just felt like Queens. I don’t know if a lot of that movie was filmed in Queens, but it felt like something that was happening in my backyard that I didn’t really know about. So it’s almost like a history lesson. The acting is so good. I’ve said that a couple of times, but that’s my truth. When he came out with the gun and beats the kid up for messing with his sister, the kid was like, “You got something to say to m–,” and before he could say the word “me,” he was beat up. That’s the scene for me. It was very real to me that guys would do that for their family. People just want to be successful in life. They all want to be happy. And some people go about it in a way that’s pretty destructive, but in that scene, you could see how much he loved his family."

"It’s a French movie. Came out, like, four or five years ago. It feels to me like the French The Godfather. That would be one way of describing it. It’s about a French-Algerian guy who goes to jail, and watching him work the system of being in jail amongst the — sort of, like, negotiating a specific French jail, and how he’s able to navigate a very tricky world of his Muslim identity, French identity, criminal identity and drug-dealing identity, all these various things. It’s super intense and a super beautifully laid out story. It’s a crazy-engaging movie. Came out in 2010. I would highly recommend that. [Director Jacques Audiard] came out with another movie called Rust and Bone in the last couple years. I just remember seeing [A Prophet] and I was really blown away by it. When I saw it, it genuinely felt like watching The Godfather, watching Al Pacino as a younger man slowly navigate and figure out how to dominate a world that seems to be, you know, overwhelming him."

"Some of Dirty Projectors’ records were a little bit impenetrable, because Dave Longstreth obviously had some really crazy concepts. A whole record was about Don Henley. Then they moved into stuff that was still really innovative, but a lot easier to understand and enjoy, even if it had very eccentric meters and rhythms and melodies. I collaborated with Dirty Projectors on a couple songs for a charity record, and at our performance at Radio City Music Hall, I met Annie Clark [of St. Vincent], who I was a big fan of already. Then we crossed paths again at a show Björk did with Dirty Projectors at Housing Works [Bookstore in New York]. The Housing Works crew saw Annie and I enjoying the show, and they approached us about doing something together. The idea was that we would do it at the bookstore, which never happened. We certainly donated money to them, but by the time we did an album and tour together, it became a bigger thing than something we could do at Housing Works."

"It’s just timeless space-age music. Music that was recorded with so little technology, and yet it sounds so technological. It’s spontaneously recorded and spontaneously mixed, and yet it sounds like it’s been arranged, by four thousand producers, four million Trevor Horns. But it was just two blokes pushing faders up and down with a couple of space echoes. It’s an amazing sound, and it’s amazing what they did in Jamaica, especially people like Lee Perry and King Tubby. Sonically, they transformed music. It was quite difficult to get hold of at the time: there was one shop in Finsbury Park, which was quite a threatening place to go if you were a young spotty skinheaded kid. I remember Johnny Rotten used to go there, but he was a bit more fearless I think! But there would be house parties where you’d hear a bit of it, and it would filter into places like Rough Trade, and spread to Rock On in Camden Town, and you’d end up, er, borrowing lots of records that you never gave back…"