"The Blue Nile are masters of the slow build, and Over The Hillside is a prime example. A lot of their songs make me cry, but this one in particular has this sense of hope and patience that becomes almost unbearably beautiful when Paul Buchanan sings, "Tomorrow I will be there / Just you wait and see." It almost sounds as if he's about to die and is singing to heaven...but heaven is a place on earth, after all."

"This is a record I had when I was a younger man and I stumbled back onto it. I love every song on it. I love his melodies. I love his surrealist point of view. He was really in love with language and melody. [sings] “My wife and my dead wife, did anyone ever see her?” He knows he’s getting your attention. He’s very entertaining. [sings] “I’m the man with the lightbulb head!” He’s got me man! He had me with the song titles alone. It has this one 80s poppy number. ['Heaven'] (sings) “She’s got heaven, heaven in her eyes.” He doesn’t sound groundbreaking lyrically up to that point. He gets to the resolve: “She’s got arms, she’s got legs, she’s got heaven.” It’s like the object of affection in the song is being dismembered. He’s not expressing his own sexual drive. He’s not saying it how Rod Stewart would say it. [At this point he unleashes a Rod Stewart howl.] Hitchcock’s poetry bubbles out of him like Lewis Carrol. It doesn’t have to make sense."

"OK, so, I’m gonna start with my first film, Days of Heaven, because it’s my first film. It’s probably, unfortunately, my best film. It’s very hard to follow up on a film like that."

"The brilliant teacher I had for a Shakespeare seminar at Yale (Joel Dorius) asked us one day if we had an idea of what heaven, for us, would consist of. What you’d hope it would be. His own answer: “Just to sit in a screening room, watching Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise projected repeatedly and endlessly throughout eternity.” Hard to argue with that when you see and resee this classic. Dorius’s version of heaven beats hell out of harps and angels."