"""That seems like the one album that if they were like, ‘Hey, you can only listen to one thing for the rest of your life,’ I think I can listen to that maybe forever. It’s kind of like punk, but it’s got poppy hooks to it. It’s pretty dirty and fast, but he was actually pretty good at writing choruses and melodies. It just is timeless to me. ""I saw a documentary on Jay, he passed away pretty early. But in the documentary, he said this shit about how he was thinking when you have your creative time in your life, there’s like two ways to look at it: either you have a certain amount of time, a certain amount of years where you are creative or you have a certain amount of ideas. I have just gone with the motto that it is a certain period in your life and you just kind have to hustle while you are hitting. I don’t know, I just think that was some inspiring shit that he said. Plus I kind of look like the dude so, the three times I’ve seen him I was weirded out, like he would see me and would be like, ‘Whoa that guy is trying to be me.’"""

"Some Like It Hot. I grew up watching that. It’s one of the ones we watch at Christmas at my house. Jack Lemmon is just wonderful."

"I was in college. I had the chicken pox so I had to stay in my dorm room. I wasn’t even sick. I had like two pox. Not like the rapper, but like two pox, and I had all this energy, and I was like [makes sick noise], and I watched Hannah and Her Sisters with two other friends of mine in the dorm that had already had chicken pox, so they could be around me. I’d never seen filmmaking like that, although, in high school, I watched New York Stories by Woody Allen, which I also was a big fan already, so I was like, “Oh, this is great.” I feel like Hannah and Her Sisters was just a beautiful film. Such a beautiful film. The work that he gets out of the actors… He casts these amazing actors, but then he gets these phenomenal performances out of them. There’s so much vulnerability in that movie that it just struck me. It was like an amazing artistic truck just running me over. I was already studying acting and knew I wanted to do that, but it really, really landed on me."

"The first song that I think put me in a musical direction was probably Just Like a Woman by Bob Dylan, which I realise is not a very PC song now. I actually just had a think about how unacceptable that song would be in today’s day and age. But I think if you say something like that without any malice or highbrow nature then you could reverse it and say ‘just like a man’ as well. I definitely had a moment with it recently though where I was like, ‘I would not write that song today.’ But it was a revelation at the time: it was just a guy with a guitar and some lyrics and not even a good voice. That kind of hit me and I said, ‘I could do that.’ “This was probably during the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and I was listening to stuff like Guns N’ Roses and Nirvana, but I wasn’t ever able to play like that, and growing up in suburban New Jersey I had no idea what Mr. Brownstone was. I was just pissed because I was in the suburbs and there was nothing to do. I was dealing with this whole lower middle-class frustration thing. Right after that, I heard the first Clash record and I made the connection between the harmonica that Joe Strummer was using with the harmonica that Bob Dylan was using."

"I had that record for a long time and didn't pay much attention to it. I turned Jesse onto it. He's since tried to get it, and it's like $20, but I found it in a bin for like $4, $6. I didn't pay much attention to it, but then once I got deep into him - it's an incredible performance around the same time. The first song on there, 'Healing Song', does that very similar thing where it's just a couple of chords, but on this one they have two bass players. So they have one guy that's just playing the basic chords, the other one's really walking around it in this spiritual way, and the piano player's incredible, and people are even singing along. It sounds like late '80s or early '90s pop, like I think about this Janet Jackson song, it's a prototype for African-American pop, where it's all these songs, like... It's not like, "Ah man, I love me some Janet Jackson" - that stuff just gets embedded just 'cause you hear it on the radio 24/7, [but] you know that song, 'Escapade'? There's a riff in that song that I play on my guitar as a joke, but it's actually the best riff ever, it's sort of like that: this simple hook, but obviously they take it beyond, because they're all such good players. It's just pop that you can't deny mixed with free spiritualism."

"Most of their beginning shit is what I fuck with. I like that real underground early shit. They were keeping it trill around that time. That's like me putting out a second album. Motherfuckers were just keeping it true to themselves and shit. Pimp C, Bun B. They're the reason we're on that trill shit."

"I will choose Singin’ in the Rain. To me, that symbolizes everything that can be great about movies. It’s just joyous, it’s just perfectly constructed. It’s just like everything came together; you know, there’s an alchemy that happens with certain films, which, however proficient you are as a filmmaker, however talented you are, and however many hits you’ve had, there has to be a sort of magic dust that happens somewhere. Often when it does, the whole world relates to it or engages with it in some way, and I think that film is such a good example of that. It happened with Casablanca. Just all these elements that could have gone wrong; any one of them could have been too much — too much sugar, too much salt, you know — but somehow the whole recipe’s perfect. And Singin’ in the Rain, to me… It’s like every scene I look forward to, and I can rewatch it endlessly. It’s just quite beautiful. They don’t make them like that anymore, I think."