"Robyn Hitchcock is another one of my songwriting heroes. He gets a special fucking prize for following his songwriting impulses better than anyone on the planet. He's so wonderfully unapologetic in his songwriting style that I think he really influenced me to remove filters. His songs often follow a kind of inner logic unto themselves. I probably got Globe of Frogs when I was 15 or 16. I look back at the music I was listening to then when I was fermenting as a songwriter, and I was obviously really influenced by the things I was listening to. Robyn Hitchcock's songwriting sort of gave me blanket permission to write about anything I wanted to – because he did. While I had my sad, emotional, poetic music off to this side, with the Cure and Leonard Cohen, Robyn Hitchcock opened up a whole world, off to the left – 'You can write about anything!' And also, like a lot of these people, he's just a fantastic songcrafter with a hooky sense of melody. I could go on and on about Robyn Hitchcock, but as far as full albums go, Globe of Frogs holds up the most, with every song being genius."

"I love Woody Allen‘s movies, and it’s hard for me to pick only one, but I’d pick Manhattan because so many of his films feel influenced by his heroes — you see some Bergman or Fellini or the Marx Brothers or whoever — and to me Manhattan is the one that most captures Woody. Even Annie Hall has bits of Amarcord in it; it’s a perfect movie, and it’s unique, but Manhattan seems to be the one where Woody does everything he does in his own particular way. One of the things I love about his movies is the tension between the sort of romantic ideals versus his true skepticism about human nature. There’s always this push, this back and forth, about how he loves people and hates people; the misanthropy and the idealism fight each other constantly in the movie, and that’s why I think his films have a special quality. Manhattan has beautiful cinematography and the Gershwin music, and the characters are actually pretty dark and lost and restless, and unhappy. You mix it together and I find it really fascinating. I know some people are really creeped out by him and the girl, but we’ll skip over that."

"My father was a film buff. He instilled in me an appreciation of the art of movies. He felt that there was no cinema artist greater than Kurosawa. At a very young age he took me to see Throne of Blood and Seven Samurai. Since then I’ve seen Seven Samurai over fifty times, in theaters, on VHS, laserdisc, and DVD. The latest Criterion edition is my favorite version of my favorite action movie. I love all the extras, especially the history of the samurai, which really enhances the movie’s historical context. In the second season of Heroes, we did a story line set in seventeenth-century Japan. The Seven Samurai box set was an invaluable resource for the costume and art department. About half of our crew watched it and were really inspired by what they saw. It’s one of those movies that I can’t turn off. One minute of viewing and I’m hooked. I’ve heard many people say that about the first two Godfather films, but for me Seven Samurai is the one that lures me into watching multiple hours of a movie I know by heart."