"I’ve always been fascinated by the film Welcome to the Dollhouse, the Todd Solondz film. It’s a really dark comedy. It might be because I grew up in Long Island and it feels like where I grew up. A lot of the strangeness of it feels familiar to me. I love the look of it. I love the tone of it. When we started working on Freaks and Geeks, I thought a lot about Welcome to the Dollhouse, in terms of how it was lit, the production design, the strange cadences of its comedy, and these kids who feel like they’re in hell, their families and how their parents treat them. She (Heather Matarazzo) and that character (Dawn Wiener) is one of the greatest outcast nerd characters ever created in film or television. So it’s for someone who always loves a great underdog story. That’s one of my favorites and not a movie that makes it a triumphant fantasy for the nerdy girl either. That is never the Todd Solondz way. I thought about it when we did Freaks and Geeks because we often thought, “This movie is about how you handle failure. It’s not about succeeding. It’s not a show about wish fulfillment.” You see that in a lot of Todd Solondz work. I don’t think we had half the balls that he has."

"Oh Jesus, have you heard that album? I just recently found that. I think it was when I first got a Moog, and I read the history of it and I heard Jean-Jacques... he was one of the first ones to use it in a pop way. I read a book about him. I didn't know that Edith Piaf sponsored him to come over to the United States. He had this instrument - I saw it on YouTube - that really, at the time, just sounded like the violin and all these other things, and it was just incredible. Also, he did a version of 'Flight Of The Bumble Bee' and he recorded a hive of bumble bees and then went back to his laboratory and spliced them individually - amazing! He kind of looks like my dentist, he's such a nerd! Disneyland uses his version of 'Baroque Hoedown' for their Electric Parade. When he went to Disneyland to hear it he was like, "Wow", he was amazed! I think at one point Disneyland stopped using it and people were like, "What the hell?! What happened to that music?" So it came back. To me, that's part of the attraction, it's wacky, it fits in with all these lights and the kids love it and all that stuff."

"I was listening to this a lot when Supergrass were making Diamond Hoo Ha over in Berlin. This was the record of that album for me and I was listening to it over and over again. I love the rawness and the vocal performances. When I first heard it, it was unlike anything I'd ever heard before. It was different and I love Tom Verlaine's vocal quality; it's really androgynous and like the male Patti Smith. It had that delivery and I love it. I've never been drawn into the alternate tunings that they used and so I've never delved into that. I'm probably not enough of a nerd about other people's music to do that. But their playing is never pompous or self-indulgent. It wasn't guitar duelling but Television are very sensitive to their instruments. Everything had its place but I think I was drawn to it because of the band I was in. This was what we aspired to in terms of Mick [Quinn] being a brilliant bass player so we let him speak with what he was doing. And you couldn't tread over Danny because he had these amazing bass fills and we had that internal dialogue where everybody got to speak. The best bands are the ones that connect that way and are really on fire when there's that understanding between each other."