"Between 25 and 30, we put out our second album, A Series of Sneaks, on Elektra, and were quickly dropped from the label afterward. At that point, I didn’t think the band was going to exist or that I would be able to keep putting out records. I didn’t know what was going to happen and I didn’t have any money and I was living in a shitty apartment in Austin for a while, in a friend’s extra room. I felt pretty directionless. But getting dropped made us come up with that single, “The Agony of Lafitte”/“Lafitte Don’t Fail Me Now,” [which took aim at the band’s Elektra A&R rep, Ron Laffitte]. We were advised not to do it, but it turned everything around. It was really the first story we had. We did it because it was funny and cathartic—someone came up with the song titles, and they were too good not to make a single out of. So I went and wrote the songs. It was a little revenge. It felt good. The next summer, I went to New York and worked a bunch of temp jobs. I latched onto one gig at Citibank, where I had to wear a tie every day, and I kinda got into it. I liked the idea of taking the subway from Brooklyn into the city and working in a high rise every day. It wasn’t anything I felt passion for, but there was something about it that I found a little romantic. And it paid really well, like $23 an hour, which seemed like crazy money in that moment. We had no business making our next album, Girls Can Tell. There was no reason why anyone would want to put out a Spoon record again. We had blown it in the indie world and in the major label world. We were tainted. We had been advised by everyone that we worked with to start another band, or take on a different name. But we just kept doing these local shows, and I kept coming up with these songs, like “Anything You Want” and “Lines in the Suit,” and I felt real proud of them. So we recorded them. I didn’t want to use another name. This was the band. That was also when I got into the Kinks. This was around the time you could start buying CDs on the internet, and there was this thing where if you signed up for this online CD store you could get a free album as your first order as long as it was an address that hadn’t been used before. So I got the entire Kinks catalog by sending CDs to all my friends addresses and my mom’s address and my PO box. And Face to Face was the first one that I got. I could feel a lot of vulnerability in his lyrics, and there were a lot of songs that were just about a single thing, like a train or a party line, just one little notion. I love that. A song like “The Fitted Shirt” would not have existed without the Kinks."

"I would say Taxi Driver. First time I saw Taxi Driver as a kid, it f—in’ blew my mind. I’ve always been a huge fan of movies about solitary, sort of loner people. I think that’s what I liked about horror movies as a kid, because the monsters were always portrayed that way. And Taxi Driver‘s obviously the ultimate movie about that. I don’t know. I’m picking very obvious movies that are genius, but they were new to me as a kid when I saw them, and they just made me go, “Oh my god, the genius of movies.” I love Taxi Driver so much; I’ve seen it so many times. It’s probably one of those movies where I could recite the whole movie straight, or I could at one point; I probably can’t any more. But when I moved to New York — I lived in New York in the early 1980s — and I literally went to every location that was in Taxi Driver, and it was all still there: the porno theater, Variety photo place where Jodie Foster runs in front of Travis’ cab, the furnished rooms building where Harvey Keitel’s standing. I actually had a friend who lived in that building, so that was even more exciting. I used to be a maniac; I went everywhere. It was like my walking tour of Taxi Driver, New York. And again, I was like, “It’s Peter Boyle as the Wizard! This is the greatest movie ever made!” I remember seeing Peter Boyle at the Beverly Center once, and I freaked out. It’s like, “Who do you get excited to meet?” “Peter Boyle!”

"My second favorite film is probably even more intellectually challenging than Wong Kar-Wai; it’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I f***ing love that movie! I have two children; I’ve probably seen this movie, with each child, about 50 times each. And that’s no exaggeration. There’s nothing I don’t know about this movie. I once went to a meeting with an executive in Hollywood, and they asked me what I wanted to do. I said, ‘I’d love to do a remake of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang‘ — I was just making it up — ‘and I’d call it Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Boom,’ and he said that’s a great title! [Laughs] I was only kidding. But that’s a movie I really love. In the UK at Christmastime, the girls would get The Sound of Music and the boys would get Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was that kind of thing, where every Christmas you would see it. So when I had kids, of course I put it on for my son and then he became obsessed with it. It’s the kind of movie where you never really get to the end; it’s so long, and the kids can only really wait so long. But the beginning of the film is like 20 minutes long, before anything even happens. It’s just the story of the car. It’s fantastic!"