"There is a film called Jeremiah Johnson that was directed by Sydney Pollack with Robert Redford. It’s about 1830s mountain men, and I’ve always been fascinated by those guys who, in the 1830s, when the West was still totally wild ? there were no homesteaders, no settlers ? guys who would go out there and live in the mountains amidst the Indians and carve out a living, catching beaver and muskrat and whatever else they were catching, skinning them and bringing the hides back, so they could be turned into hats for fashionable people in London. There’s some really great music in it. I loved the nature and the Rocky Mountains; I think it actually was shot in the early days of the Sundance institute out in the Salt Lake area, although the story has it happening in the Rocky Mountains, probably a little east of there. Montana, Wyoming, that area. So, love that film."

"He started so much. One of the many things I love about Bo Diddley, besides the fact that he created his own instruments with his own effects in them and was one of the first rock & rollers to have women in his band and wore glasses, is that he was a complete original. He's playing blues but it also feels like pop songs to me. Maybe I'm using that term a bit loose but a song like 'I'm a Man' or 'Before You Accuse Me', there's something to them. I feel like it's almost slighting them to call them pop but they're put together in a way that it's not Robert Johnson. There's something new that he's doing here. The fact that he had those shakers and it was such a big part of his sound. We've used that shaker sound and have tried to duplicate it many, many times. You use a little bit of room and you distort it a little bit and that's the Bo Diddley shaker sound. He took a form and made it something else."

"Tom Waits really brings a lot of showbiz into his records. It’s in there in the actual songwriting. He knows how to strip things down and get to some skeletal place that’s really strong. He’s trying to be true to his Jazz and his Blues. That is to be admired. There’s a lot of the textures you don’t hear so much. All that vocabulary is really seductive. I think that he’s a good songwriter whatever record you talk about of his. It’s not because there’s some fucking guy playing a saw. It’s like the Bruce Springsteen thing. It’s stripped down, universal, folky bluesy stuff. He’s trying to say: “You guys think you can change things overnight. Forget the new thing. What about Django Reinhart? Son House?” It’s like the Grand Duchy thing. People get obsessed with our production like, “What’s the new story?” It’s admirable when people say: “What about 1949, man?!” At first, I heard a cool White Stripes record and thought: “Who do you think you are, Robert Johnson?” And I get jealous. Fucking A! man. It’s like primal Led Zeppelin or something. But at the end of the day, I always end up respecting Jack White. [Black does an impression of the 'Seven Nation Army' riff.] Jack White has some believability."

"So he started off as an indie guy. 'Loser' was just a song he released on an indie label, but it caught fire. MTV picked it, blah blah blah. And it was later put on a proper album on Geffen. He is an eclectic artist and a Scientologist to boot. The irony is that Beck's father [David Campbell] actually arranged the symphony orchestra that backed us up at the Melbourne stadium when we played there. Mellow Gold has got this eclectic sense to it in terms of, like, he uses drum loops, which I hate, but it sounds cool to me! He uses different kinds of instruments and seems to play them all, and the songwriting is all over the place. But at the core of it, what he doesn't do that other singers do is show off. He just gets the personality going and sings the song. So when you think of Brian Johnson and Robert Plant and Paul Rodgers, they're showing off with their vocals, singing way up on the high end of their range. I don't care if it's Steven Tyler or anybody else, you show off! Beck doesn't show off. He's just midrange or low-down. His attitude comes not from what he does vocally but it's laid back, kind of matter-of-fact, as if he's just thinking to himself. It's a unique thing. In that way, even though it doesn't have a wall of guitars or any of that, it's very rock. That sensibility he's got, although I'm sure he would consider himself an indie artist, but his sensibility is very rock."