"As a band I love their vibe, the way they look and interact – all with their own little character going on. But I’m obsessed with [lead singer] Brittany Howard. There’s something about Brittany that puts fire in my soul. She reminds me of Etta James, Ann Peebles – she’s so fucking full of soul, overflowing, dripping, that I almost can’t handle it. On their most recent album [Sound & Color], there’s a song called Don’t Wanna Fight. Brittany comes in with a scream: “YOOOOOOOOOOOW!” I’d love to experiment more with my own voice like that. She’s exceptional, she blows my mind. I almost want to start playing the electric guitar, just to be more like her. Back in 2013, she was in the next-door dressing room at the Grammys. We were both getting ready – I think I was putting on my Spanx – and we met. It turned out she’d brought her grandmother to the Grammys. My love went even deeper for her at that point."

"I also love Elia Kazan and it was a toss up for me between On the Waterfront, which I saw as a child, and East of Eden, which I saw as a young kid, and also rediscovered as an adult. But I do remember more recently a beautiful print that was struck — maybe by UCLA archives, maybe by AFI; I’m not sure who — and they had a screening of it at a theater that’s the longer one there in Century City, beautiful theater. At one time I think it was the state of the art theater in the country, with the first reclining seats and all that. They had [screened it] somehow, in conjunction with the LA city school system and the English department of LA city schools. And I believe that the matinee that I saw was predominantly schools… And the kids have to read East of Eden or Steinbeck, Travels with Charley or something in school, and you could tell this was going to be their Steinbeck assignment, so it was a field trip. But this… wasn’t a movie for young people, and I was a little worried that the noise, the kicking of the seats, and the high jinx that were prevailing in the auditorium before the lights went down would keep going. And I remember about five minutes into the film there’s a shot of James Dean hopping a freight — he jumps this train, near Monterey and he goes to Salinas, or vice versa — he hops the train and is on his way to Monterey to visit his mother, to find his mother in a brothel. And it’s cold, it’s evening — he pulls his little sweater over his head like a hoodie and he bundles up almost in a fetal position on the top of this train, snaking it’s way through the country side in Monterey county. And the entire audience shut up and you could hear a pin drop. It was the power of a true movie star. It was the first American teenager, James Dean, on the screen. And it didn’t matter that it was a predominantly… junior high school to high school kids — they got it. They got his angst, they got his beauty, they got his rebellion, all in literally 30 seconds’ worth of him exuding teen angst in the film and it was just this great moment. It reminded me of the power of stardom, of light and shadow on the screen, of a Greta Garbo, of a great screen kiss between — God rest her soul — the late Maureen O’Hara and John Wayne in The Quiet Man, or John Travolta strutting down the sidewalk in Saturday Night Fever— it’s just this great thing. And I love that movie anyway. There’s sequences and scenes in that movie, and James Dean, his grace in that movie — I think his movement in that movie is only matched by one or two Lee Marvin performances, and maybe one or two Sean Connery performances that I’ve seen in terms of just male physical grace. Really a great film, and I had to put Kazan on my list. So Kazan would be my number five for East of Eden starring James Dean."