"He's also an anti folk artist and a friend. He's super underrated. For me there could be an alternative universe where Turner Cody is considered to be like Neil Young or Townes Van Zandt. He totally deserves that. His catalogue is as good as theirs, people need to wake up and hear it. This album is a good starting point to explore Turner's work. It's from the period of his life where he almost began to become the young Arthur Rimbaud. It's a very literary folk record, and he's also the most romantic anti folk songwriter. A lot of anti folk uses humour and satire, but Turner's stuff has always been deeply romantic without being particularly funny which sent him apart from the more punky stuff that went straight for your throat. He's a romantic, mystic poet who makes music. The title track actually paints New York City as an anthropological creature that's going through the processes of change. He really taps into corruption and decline and the surrounding elements that led into the financial crash, Occupy Wall Street, Brexit and Donald Trump. I feel like Turner understood these things were going to happen. If you listen to this record and his next one, Who Went West, it's all about what's happening now, yet he was just a 19-year-old who felt what would come. The lyrics are all prophetic in n that way, he understood what would happen in the world."

"I just love Mean Streets, period. I grew up in my own version of that. Scorsese is a hero of mine. The movie’s really about him, you know, as a filmmaker — you watch Harvey’s performance when he goes to the church and he’s there on his knees in his version of praying, and you hear the voice-over. What’s amazing about that movie is — now that I’ve met Scorsese a few times — I can see that he was sort of in that world. He’s said it a few times: “I wasn’t sure if I was gonna become a priest or a gangster.” [Laughs] And when you see the movie, you see him, and you get that. You see Harvey’s character is a little bit of a priest, he’s trying to be a good guy but he’s in a world of mobsters and he needs to be accepted by that world. I love the elements that Scorsese captured. I love, again, that sort of brave filmmaking — they didn’t have any money to do a parade, but he just captured that ceremony, you know. They put cameras on the roof and shot down. They put you in the middle of a world and you felt like you were really in it. And De Niro, of course, is genius. It’s ridiculous how good he is. I could go on and on about why I love those movies, as far as technically, and performance-wise — but that’s the basic essence."