"In more recent years, I decided if I was going to play acoustic punk music I wasn’t going to be the guy that just bangs on a guitar. I wanted to learn how to play guitar and use it to dictate what I needed to say, as well as my lyrics. So I took online lessons to learn about finger picking and I learnt Romeo and Juliet by Dire Straits, note for note. I think it’s one of the most beautiful love songs in the world, and I love the fact that he doesn’t even sing it. He just talks it. I adore Mark Knopfler for that. He seems so unaffected in this song. He didn’t care about Wham! or Oingo Boingo or whatever was popular at the time. He just said, ‘I’m singing like this and I’m finger picking because that’s what I love.’ That goes right back to Bob Dylan for me: from Just Like a Woman to Romeo and Juliet. And when I finally learn how to play that song note for note I’m going to play it for people."

"Bill Forsythe film, Scottish and unassuming. He came to the states and he worked with Peter Riegert and you’ll recognize Peter Capaldi as a very young man named Donnie. It’s so sweet, and yet savvy, and I think that’s the same thing with Local Hero — it’s a comic film that captures a tremendous amount of sadness and that’s really hard to pull off, to have a character who’s fundamentally sad, and then finds something wonderful and risks it being taken away from him. That’s the complication of the film. He’s the oil man that comes over from this huge air conglomerate in Houston and his mission is to come over to this small town and buy the town and turn it into an oil refinery. It was a precursor to things like Northern Exposure. Instead of having aggressively quirky characters, all of these characters are people I’ve met when I’ve been to the British Isles and Scotland, and yes they are that eccentric. Peter Riegert is wonderful in it. It’s slow and it’s soft, but it’s hilarious, and the music is by Mark Knopfler [of Dire Straits]. I’ve never shown this to anyone who regretted seeing it."

"If I had to have one favorite movie that I’ve seen a hundred times, it’s probably that. I’m not really sure why I first liked it; I must have been fourteen or something like that when I first saw it. It’s always meant so much to me. Peter Riegert plays a maybe 40-year-old businessman who’s in the oil business and is called and sent up to the coast of Scotland to look into buying some land where they found some oil and he has to negotiate with the local village. [He] thinks it’s going to be a very tough thing to sort of uproot all these people, [and] the comedy is that they’re only too happy to sell out. They’re just trying to negotiate the price up as much as possible. It unfolds at its own pace, and he falls in love with this town and with the sea and cares less and less about the deal. He more and more wants to trade places with the local innkeeper and move to this town and stay there. A beautifully made film and I feel like there was a rash of movies right afterward that sort of tried to capture what he achieved. These people sort of coming to some little town and being transformed. It’s so touching and so funny and warm, and has so many moments of grief and elegance and delicacy. It’s got beautiful music by Mark Knopfler. That might have been the first movie that I felt that strongly about at that sort of formative time. But it’s very strange to feel like that’s the movie, you know? It doesn’t have some young protagonist. [But] from then on I was obsessed with Scotland and Ireland. Wanting desperately to go up there, and then when I did, it was very similar to that feeling. I went [on] a Bill Forsyth binge and watched all of his movies, like Gregory’s Two Girls, and Comfort and Joy, and Breaking In, even, with Burt Reynolds of all people. I wish he were still making movies."