"I think [the performances are] what it is for me with films. Like Raging Bull, for instance. It’s just beautiful. I love Robert De Niro and how he was just able to embody Jake LaMotta that way. That was inspiring to me. I remember thinking, “Oh wow, this guy is just like a chameleon.” He’s just able to take on the spirit of someone and become this person. I was really fascinated by that. The fact that he went on to gain all this weight for LaMotta in the later years, and his relationship with his brother; it’s so powerful. I had a younger brother. I just really related to that. And their relationship, how they just love each other so much, but do such awful things to each other sometimes. And the whole story itself, the life of a fighter. What makes a fighter and what makes a fighter kick? I’m also a huge boxing fan. I box. That was something that I considered doing as a profession at one point, until I got punched really f—ing hard [laughing]. It’s just an awful f—ing feeling, and it sucked. And I was like, “I’m not going to do this for a living; there’s no way [laughing].” And with that, my whole attitude changed about that really quick. But I have so much respect for what those guys do, the fact that these guys — I mean, they literally fight for a living, and they train so hard. I’ve been in the gym and I see what these guys do. It’s also a poverty thing, too, in a lot of ways. I don’t think a lot of really wealthy people jump in the gym and decide they want to be a boxer. It’s usually these guys; “I’m gonna make something for me. I’m gonna make something for my family. I’m gonna do it by training six, seven, eight hours a day and getting in the ring with one other man. And f—ing laying it all on the f—ing line.” I have a great respect for that. It’s one of those movies you can feel. It’s visceral that way. And the dialogue just seems to come almost effortlessly. So much like life; it really is like you are watching this piece of life. I really love films like that. "

"Continuing the otherworldly theme, as we’re looking chronologically at our lives and youth, this is the next song that hit me as a young person, at the age of seven or eight. The reason it hit me so hard, so young, was because it was one of the first songs that I understood was about death. “I grew up in the Catskill Mountains and Grasshopper grew up in Lake Erie, so we were well away from New York, punk rock or anything that was happening in the ‘70s, we were out in the hinterland. All that I could listen to was AM radio and ‘Seasons in the Sun’ was a massive hit, but lyrically its dealing with death, ‘Goodbye to you my trusted friend.’ He’s dying and I’m a young kid thinking ‘Why’s this guy dying on the radio? What’s he dying from?’ It was so much more than the syrupy, ‘I’ve got love in my tummy’ stuff that had come out of the ‘60s. “And this mystery, I was old enough to know what dying meant, but too young to understand that you could sing about it. Yet here was Terry Jacks singing this very sad, almost suicidal song and it hit me like a ton of bricks. now I started not only having to process music that I was deeply in love with, but also processing lyrics at seven or eight. The idea of the mystery within the song, that there were not only unanswered questions, but the biggest question, death. That’s what rang my bell, it was existentialism in a three-and-a-half-minute pop song. “I didn’t have all the tools to process it artistically at my young age but I knew it was deep, it was important and it was really, really sad. It was almost like a traumatic moment in early childhood that you didn’t experience directly, but indirectly it shook your bones, like the death of a relative you’ve barely met. You can tell everyone around you is ringing like a brass bell from it and that was something I got from that song."