"I first met Bradford Cox in 2008. I had just gotten into Deerhunter, and we both played the Pitchfork festival that year. I just saw him around backstage and went and talked to him, and we ended up sitting on this ledge, watching people stream out of the festival. We became friends, and he ended up playing with us the next day. And then we took them out for the Transference tour. After Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, I thought Spoon was going to keep going up and up and up—and in terms of selling tickets, it has. I knew Transference was an uglier record that didn’t have as many hits on it, but I still thought everybody that bought Ga Ga Ga was going to buy it. I wasn’t exactly right. I don’t think we failed on that record, but it did turn a lot of people off."

"little earlier, I got on a binge of Korean thrillers and… Oldboy. As far as Korean thrillers go, Oldboy and I Saw the Devil exchange places [as] my favorite Korean film. [For the remake of Oldboy], they manage to completely ruin it. And I don’t know how they managed to so thoroughly ruin it, but they… They could have just re-shot it shot-for-shot and have the American screenplay be the subtitles of the Korean film and it would have been a fantastic movie. And they managed to poop all over celluloid. But the original one, phew. I highly recommend that whole… There’s a trilogy. It’s Oldboy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and, what’s the third one [Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance]? It’s a Vengeance trilogy and I love them all three. But that whole Vengeance series is amazing. Those Koreans know how to scare you."

"I’m going to go with Raging Bull. I love Raging Bull. That’s another one I saw at a young age, and I didn’t love it at first. I didn’t know what to think of it. I was like, “This isn’t Rocky.” [Laughs] I was compelled and disturbed by what it was doing, stuff I didn’t get at the time. But that movie struck me at my core. I didn’t know if I liked it, but then I had to come back to it, and then I became obsessed with it and his whole career. It’s very hard to pick a favorite movie of his. Raging Bull is one I go back to, and there’s something between the expressionistic filmmaking of those boxing matches. There’s just a neo-realism in the dynamic between him, his brother, and his wife. It’s really powerful and incredibly inspiring."