"I used to have a studio in Brondesbury Villas up in Kilburn and there was a little book shop that I used to go to and one day they were playing this record. I think she is one of the great musicians alive at the moment; she plays bass but she plays it with such ferocity. She's a very interesting person to work with because she doesn't think at all in terms of chords or anything. You just play a track to her and she just starts to do something. She comes up with the most amazing riffs that are just completely unlike anything anyone would think of doing. The go-go scene she came out of was a particular approach to rhythm, and it's very contained. It's not at all splashy. It's all about really intricate, tight and accurate rhythm. I was in Montreux in 1995, I was working with David [Bowie] on that album, Outside, and the festival was on. I heard this music coming from the festival place and I thought, ""Wow, what is that?"", and it was her with her seven-piece band, who were the meanest looking people you've ever seen. This giant on the drums, two guitar players with these kind of slitty shades playing the meanest funk guitar. It was the probably the best show I ever saw. I was shivering with excitement. It's so harmonically dangerous. It's so strange what the instruments are playing. If you heard them in the abstract you'd think you could never put these together into a song. They're off on their own trips and somehow they just cohere together."

"You know, it’s tough to really summate your favorite movies, and it changes so often based on your vibe and things like that. When I w­as thinking about it, I was trying to think of what are the movies that continually show up in the top 10. And I landed on The Bicycle Thief – or Bicycle Thieves; sometimes people say “thief,” sometimes say “thieves.” [Director Vittorio] De Sica’s Bicycle Thief is like a north star project for me. First of all, it’s arguably the greatest film in the father-son series. It’s one of the bits of neo-realist masterpiece. The way that De Sica aligned it with his casting and the themes of his movie is always an inspiration. The fact that he saw Lamberto Maggiorani at the audition, that he showed up with his son – he’s a factory worker who showed up with his son – he immediately said, “Oh, this is the guy who needs to play the character.” And the fact that he cast the kid, Enzo, off of the street while they were filming, who was selling flowers for his father. The fact that De Sica had the vision to try to blur the lines, starting with casting and then, towards the climax of the movie he shot, he modeled his production around the release of a soccer match. So that he knew he was going to have hundreds upon thousands, thousands upon thousands of people leaving the stadium at the same time. And he would shoot around. He’s using reality as the fabric of his fiction film. And that, to me, makes it an ultimate masterpiece of all time."

"Romeo and Juliet is on my list because I saw it when I was at a very formative age. I think I was 14 or 15, and at that age, girls are very dramatic about romance and they’re just starting to get those feelings, and love is very painful and very important. It’s overwhelming and you have these huge crushes, and so Romeo and Juliet is all about that huge first love. And you couldn’t have found two more beautiful teenagers than Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting… and that was the first time I had ever seen Michael York and he was stunning — he was stunning. The costumes were gorgeous. Zeffirelli was a beautiful artist. He designed theater and opera and sets, so it was just beautiful. I think why I love Italy so much now is because of that movie, and it made me fall in love with Shakespeare. That’s one of the first times that Shakespeare became not just some dusty old English thing that you had to study in school, but it became really alive. You know what else did that really well? Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet… So, Romeo and Juliet was my first introduction. I walked around pretending I was Olivia Hussey. I had my long dark hair parted in the middle, and we had these, like, hippie baby-doll blouses that had the empire waist, so I would wear that all the time and I’d sorta stare at myself in the mirror. Of course, there was nobody in Cleveland, OH who looked anything like Leonard Whiting, so it was all in my head."

"Okay, so I knew Lauren Oliver was a good writer, but damn! They weren't kidding when they compared this book to "The Tale of Desperaux" (which I also loved!) or "The Graveyard Book" (which I didn't finish, but found a scene very similar to the opening - it involved Bod Fading/Vanishing). Oliver's just a great storyteller, I had just gotten the book early morning at BEA and found that while waiting on line, I kept searching through my multiple tote bags to find this one so I can take advantage of the reading time instead of mingling with other fans on line. This hadn't happened to me for the two days I was there. My favorite characters were easily Liesl, Po, BUNDLE! and Will - who are the four obvious go-to-characters to have as your favorites, but their narratives were great. Different to Oliver's other novels, she wrote in third person and covered other characters beside her main, going so far to write about a guard named Mo (short for Molasses since he's so slow) and Mrs. Snout, owner of Snout's Inn and Restaurant. I'm excited to put this in the hands of my middle-grade peeps come this October, but any other lover of Lauren Oliver or YA will appreciate this story just as much. It has heart, deals with grief, and delivers questions about the Other Side as Oliver freshly explores it. "On the third night after the day her father died, Liesl saw the ghost." You'll ineffably thank me for recommending this. It's hands-down one of my favorite middle-grade stories and I'm already desperately eager to reread it."

"I heard them when I was touring with Bikini Kill and had started hanging out in New York. They're from the Bronx and I was learning about the sampling of their song 'Moody', one of the most sampled songs to date. With them it's again the sound that made me go, "Wow!" The production was really interesting, that you could make this very sparse dance music; it's just a bassline and drums. I can't really remember who introduced me to ESG, probably my boyfriend at the time. It might also have been Adam Horovitz from the Beastie Boys who now I'm married to. Or maybe Tobi Vail gave me a tape before that. I saw their reunion show in NY, it was one of their first reunion shows, and two of their daughters were on stage. Then we got to tour with them. We were really nervous around them. I love how the singer's voice can sound so sweet and angry at the same time, like, "I'm just a regular woman, a regular gal." I always wanted to be just a woman in band; I just didn't know I was going to have to work so hard to make it okay for me to be that. Now in my 40s I finally don't have to make every single song about, "Go women go!" For me, one of the biggest achievements of my life has been having this experimental band from 2005 telling me, "Oh we just felt we didn't have to sing about feminism because you already did that." They just got to sing about whatever they wanted and try these really interesting melodic and dissonant things."

"I wanted to include something current and with Savages you can hear all these influences of Joy Division, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Wire, etc; this distillation of all my favourite bands from my adolescence. I like being able to hear all of those influences, but although it sounds like their influences it doesn't sound at all derivative. It still sounds new and fresh and fierce. It's four ladies playing this really tough music. I bought the record and I thought it was pretty good, it sounded like it was made for me. And then I went to see them live and I was blown away. It was so tough. It's hard to pinpoint what made it so tough. It's these four women on stage, taking up every corner of the stage, all dressed in black and giving no eye contact to the crowd. They had such presence, you could feel their energy. It was really moving. My boyfriend turned to me during the show and said: ""I'm really enjoying this because it's really good but also because I know 15-year-old you is totally freaking out right now."" And I said: ""She is! She is! I think I might cry!"" In fact the last time I saw them I actually did cry. They did a cover of Suicide's 'Dream Baby Dream' and it was just all too much for me. So after seeing that first show I went back and re-listened to the record and it took on a whole new sound to me. I can now hear all of that energy coming out of the record."