"To me this record sounds like electricity. It's sorta arty-punk. Tom Verlaine sounds on the verge of a nervous breakdown and his singing and lyrics are so dreamy and elliptical. It's brutally stark and spare. The guitar playing is so amazing, so different - there's this tension, this raw clean air playing in the guitars - it's just so well arranged and yet unlike any record I've ever heard. The album never really had any commercial success but it's such a seminal record. I think it influenced a lot of bands along the way. It opened everyone’s ears to what you can do with an electric guitar. Both Duke and Steve (of Garbage) are huge fans of Marquee Moon and every now and then this record will pop up on our references. Sometimes we'll say, “You should do a guitar that sounds like a Television riff, that real tall angular sound."" One of the songs off our new album, Man On A Wire, has a little bit of a Television influence to it."

"I mean, Scorsese has to be in there. I always feel bad for these, because there’s always about 50 films I wish I could have put in there. Scorsese for sure, and I always get torn between Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. That’s my top three Scorsese films. I have a amazing soft spot for Mean Streets — I just think there’s something incredibly raw and energetic about that movie. But I think Raging Bull just shocked me to my core. I couldn’t believe that he could make me care about someone who was so animalistic, who was so brutal, who was so violent. And then I still felt sympathy for him. I still felt like I got to know a well-rounded human being, I got to know this character in that performance. De Niro is astounding. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it in my life. And those boxing sequences, they’ve never been matched, they’ve never been bettered for me. So, I think Raging Bull is definitely up there."

"For years, this fairly obscure Russian movie has probably been my favorite movie. I first had a crummy Russian VHS with blocky Soviet-era lettering (in which the movie title was translated as Unmailed Letter). Then in the early 2000s, my friend somehow found me a bootleg DVD. (Shoutout to Bilge!) Miraculously, in 2012, I saw it listed on Criterion’s “Coming Soon” page. I remember when I saw that, I just couldn’t believe it. This story of survival in the Siberian wilderness is simply the greatest “tough terrain” adventure movie ever made (with apologies to another Criterion fave, The Wages of Fear). Both director Mikhail Kalatozov and his cinematographer, Sergei Urusevsky, seem half-crazed, and my jaw drops repeatedly while watching. Kalatozov is one of cinema’s boldest stylists, and there are a zillion shots in this movie that blow me away. Yet, despite the cinematic fireworks, the most affecting shots might actually be the many meticulous close-ups of the explorers’ faces, which foreground the raw human drama unfolding before your eyes."

"This is a film — and this is kind of going away from this relationship theme — but this is a film that, when I was little, I loved. I mean, I’ve loved it my whole life. I don’t know what that says about me, but I loved Sunset Boulevard. I was a big old-movie fan when I was, you know, older than most people should be when they’re older-movie fans. [Gloria Swanson is] just so spectacular in that film and it sort of formed my idea of that raw, dramatic acting. And the writing… The writing in that movie is unbelievable. So many incredible one-liners. It’s one of those movies that you can watch now and you’re just, like, “Damn, that was a good line,” you know? Like, God, that was some good writing back then. The thing is that movies written that way wouldn’t fit in, really, these days. It would sound strange, like you couldn’t really do it now. But thank God we have them."