"Number three would be Lon Chaney as Phantom of the Opera. I think what struck me was his theatrics. Again, he did go over and big, as that era of acting would dictate, but he did it with such conviction and such truth that I bought every single minute of it. He left me, again, terrified and chilled."

"Yes, that's the one. I know both recordings, and the movie too, but I think the one I listened to mostly was the later one. In a lot of ways Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya, and this piece in particular, represent what I'd ultimately like to do as an artist: bringing opera together with popular music; classical singing with everyday life. I've written a couple of operas, I've worked with Shakespeare's sonnets, I've made pop records, and I have this folk background, and I feel that Kurt Weill with The Threepenny Opera was the pinnacle where all of the elements that he was influenced by joined together to create this other animal. Lotte Lenya was the one who interpreted that. It's a really good touchstone to keep in mind in terms of what I do in the pop world and the theatre world."

"Whoa! From the very beginning, it is the original soap opera, and I loved every second of the drama! To watch a writer like Dickens yet again (I had already read “Great Expectations,”) weave so many characters’ storylines together with one another… This book required you to pay attention to every character and every word and served to remind this: no person or thing is insignificant."

"This is literary kismet, with screenwriter Truman Capote channeling Henry James—and with a child lead bearing the name of my own daughter, Flora. The story, which takes full measure of the spookiness and unknowability of children, has worked in every format—first James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, then the chamber opera of the same name, and finally this liminal black-and-white film."

"… But I knew I should pick out a book book as well, so I grabbed the Thomas Hardy to balance it out. I remember trying to read it, highlighting all the words I didn’t understand. I gave it another crack a decade or so later and found it engrossing. Like a soap opera with sheep. Turns out there were woodland creatures in that one too."