"Saw this at a Bresson retrospective at MOMA, popular dinner spot of many of NYC’s finest moviegoers. And who knew dinner could be so work-intensive, demanding to be unwrapped and rewrapped several times over? Now that I have Laurie Bird on my mind, I am seeing her resemblance and similarity to Balthazar’s Anne Wiazemsky. Maybe these two films have more in common than I would have thought. Both involve brown hair with bangs, drifters, and modes of transportation, although in the case of Balthazar the real tragic, beautiful victim is the donkey. You just don’t get more beautiful and tragic than a donkey. Let it be said that I did not liken James Taylor to a donkey."

"This was my album of 1974, although it came out in 1973. I guess I was always catching up with Frank Zappa. The first album by him that I bought was Hot Rats, and I found that a rather irritating album of not very evolved guitar playing. Frank was a bit of a one-trick pony as a guitarist, but as a musician, arranger and bandleader of the traditional sort, he was at the top of the tree, although he wasn’t unique as a bandleader. There were by then other bandleaders in rock, blues and soul groups like BB King, James Brown and in England John Mayall. In America, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart were bandleaders of an apparently tough-cookie nature, although everyone who worked with Frank seems to have revered him as a musician and a person."

"In Talking Heads, the record collection was filled with Hamilton Bohannon, James Brown, Roxy Music, Funkadelic, and P-Funk, that whole world. George Clinton and his whole crazy P-Funk philosophy was great; they were doing these kind of spectacles. As we kept making records, they evolved into more rhythmic affairs, kind of weird, white-person funk. We decided that in order to represent this music live onstage, we needed to recruit some real funkers into the band. The size of the band pretty much doubled. It was a big, nervy thing to do, and it was a mess at first. But man, was it fun. In this period, I decided to formalize the tour into a show that became Stop Making Sense. And that was about as far as we could go with that idea. It liberated me musically, but also as a person. The music was a lot more ecstatic, almost trance-y; you could get lost in it, way more than you could when it’s just a four piece."

"The Blues Brothers was a big movie for me, because I was about 13 to 14 years old, and it was my first introduction to James Brown, my first introduction to Aretha Franklin. I knew about Murph and the Magic Tones, which was made up of Booker T and the MGs, essentially. Steve Cropper and “Duck” Dunn, the two guys in there, they were two members of Booker T and the MGs, and then the drummer, you know, he’s got one of my favorite lines in movie history; his name’s Willie Hall. There’s this great line where Willie Hall goes, “Jake, Elwood, you’re out of prison, things are lookin’ good for you. You got the money you owe us, mother f***er?” That’s Willie Hall. He actually plays at my kids’ birthday parties here in Memphis, Tennessee. But, it was a movie that just had the… I mean, my dad and I watched that, and the whole scene where the nun is just beating them up; I’ve never seen my dad laugh so hard. It’s an electrifying, fun movie, and Steven Spielberg makes a cameo at the end of it."

"The other thing I should mention is that I had these two books called the Rough Guide to World Music, which are two giant volumes. I was obsessed with those for a long time. At the time, you had to go and buy a load of CDs, you couldn't just go on Spotify and check it out. It was a bit of an investment. A lot of those countries have got these dudes who, in the 50s, suddenly heard James Brown, or something, and went: shit, what we're doing sounds really old fashioned. We need horns, and Hammond organs, and guitars. It happened all over Africa. There's not an awful lot to say about this song apart from that it really blends a lot of worlds for me. It blends the guitar, with the world music thing, and with the saxophone as well and that's why I think I love that song so much. It's only that one song, I can't find anything else by that guy. Whenever you play that track it's always going to pick everyone up. It's got such an incredible energy."