"I first song I remember loving had to be ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?’ by Culture Club and so I guess I figured out I was an emo pretty early on in my life! But I really just connected with that song when I was a kid. For one, I was taken back by this man’s look, is that a girl or a boy? I was intrigued at that moment, but the song itself is a really good song. A lot of Culture Club’s music had sort of a reggae feel to it and at that point I had never heard reggae music and it sort of felt other-worldly in a way."

"Probably my favorite book of all time because of the truthful, raw language—it sounds so modern. To think that it was written almost seventy-five years ago at the end of World War II seems both astounding and inevitable. Plain, honest communication and wild, spontaneous beauty were all that was left after they’d cleared away the rubble. Enter Holden Caulfield, an off-kilter personality balancing an unlikely mix of cruelty, kindness, truth, acceptance and rebellion in one rather average noggin. Holden represents a new type of heartthrob, presaging the bored, hyper-vigilant James Dean types of later cinema—the romantic nihilists, capable of loving fiercely in the moment but standing equally aloof from and critiquing their own emotions. The dawning of the age of emo."