"Nebraska is different from all the other Bruce Springsteen albums because it's not very bombastic! It's just acoustic guitar on a four-track machine. It's got to be the most lo-fi record you could get from Bruce Springsteen. I believe that's because he made demos for the E Street Band, and just didn't like how they sounded when they were played with the band. His producers, and I think one of his bandmates said to him, "The demos sound better". When I first heard it, I think that I only knew Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie in terms of that type of sound - someone working with a harmonica and an acoustic guitar. He's writing about the working classes of America, or people who are failing in their lives or trying to make it but failing. It's darker than other records too though. I think he's taking inspiration from stories he's read in the newspaper about criminals who are serving life sentences or those who are going to the electric chair. At the same time, it's about families, brothers and someone's father who is no long alive. It's got a lot of humanity in it as a record, with this resonating and wonderful sound - daunting vocals and very haunting harmonica parts. There are also loads of reverbs and a glockenspiel is on there too. It's a murky-sounding record at first, but the more you listen to it, you find all of these other details. I was at school when I first heard it. I couldn't think of an obvious way that Bruce has influenced me, until I wrote a song called 'Elvis Has Left The Building' which is on my new album. I just thought that the kind of song it was, and the mood, reminded me of 'Streets Of Philadelphia' or 'Nebraska' - not in an obvious way, and I didn't think of him in order to write it, but it reminded me of that in an odd way."

"It was 1966, my senior year of high school, and with one of my closest friends in tow I cut school and went into New York, to the Bleecker Street Cinema, to see a double bill of Breathless and 8 1/2. I had seen foreign films before, but nothing like these two. We loved Breathless. It was rebellious, anarchic, romantic, and the characters were so superkool we wanted them in our seventeen-year-old lives. But as much as Breathless moved and influenced me, 8 1/2 rocked my world. In the first five minutes, during Guido’s dream, I could feel my brain collapsing in on itself. The camera’s POV of Guido’s foot tethered to the ground as he floats high above the ocean, then suddenly falling only to awake with a hand grasping for consciousness, was deeply personal for me. I often wake from my nightmares in much the same way. Forty years later, in season one of Heroes, an episode called “6 Months Ago” afforded me the opportunity to re-create those very same shots. It was thrilling to use those same images in the service of a different story of my own creation. If forced to name my all-time favorite movie sequence, the childhood memory of “Asa Nisi Masa” would make the final four. It is cinema as magic. The way the mentalist grapples with the words Asa Nisi Masa, and we travel through Marcello Mastroianni’s mind and into a haunting memory of the past. His childhood is alive with mysticism, mischief, and a lost family’s love. Don’t get me started about the exquisite finale, with its parade of characters and clowns. Is Guido dead or not? I still haven’t decided. Leaving the Bleecker, my mind permanently blown, I thought that I would never understand this movie—and that is one of its strengths. After forty-two years and as many viewings, it reminds me of the best of Bob Dylan, the last line of “Frankie Lee & Judas Priest”: “Nothing is revealed.”"