"I'm starting to write my second record and am becoming really inspired by French pop music. This is currently my favorite Serge Gainsbourg song, but I kind of change my mind every minute about that."

"William Klein, an expat photographer, looks at what drives the USA, a cocky hubris. Delirious colors and comic realities of the American way. Serge Gainsbourg music! A riotous pop art telling of the George W. Bush era long before it came to be"

"I became popular in France prior to becoming popular anywhere else; for whatever reason they just adopted me. I didn’t speak any French, I didn’t tailor that in any way, but they said I was a bit like Serge and then I got into him as a consequence. The French are a weird culture, I’m really blessed that I’m popular there but I also think… fuck, it is quite uncool there. They’re the only nation in the world that clap on the one and the three, everyone else claps on the two and the four, so there’s something inherently corrupt about their understanding of music. They’re better at pastry than they are at music. Serge Gainsbourg understood how shit French music was, and he turned it around."

"I’d known nothing of Serge Gainsbourg until I was co-producing an album by a French group called Louise Attaque. Their first album ended up being the biggest rock album in France, which was an amazing thing. Being with these French people and making this album, myself and my co-producer asked, ‘Well, what music would you recommend for us to listen to, things that we might not know that you could tell us about. What do you like? Because we like your music and what you do, so what is it that you like?’ This was the first thing that somebody there said, ‘This is what you have to hear, this is great,’ and it just struck me that way. We went to a big record store and said to everybody in the band, ‘Why don’t you pick out music for us? What’s the two or three CDs that are the best, or that you think we need to hear?’ We wouldn’t know a lot of this or maybe any of it, and one of them recommended this and everybody agreed, ‘This is something you need to hear.’ It didn’t sound like anything I’d heard before and I immediately liked it very much, the whole album. And then I found out about Serge Gainsbourg and all the things he did for decades, all different kinds of music. I think he’s really one of the great ones"

"Most people know Serge Gainsbourg's Histoire de Melody Nelson album, but what's interesting is that in the early '90s, he actually went into a dark, weird phase that French people don't really like. They consider his music from that time weak. But for me, it's the best. It's porn, it's queer, it's rap before that was a thing in France. It's just him mumbling obscene things on drum-and-guitar heavy production, really raw and tough. At the same time, it's poetic. The contrast is interesting: it's beautiful but dirty. On this album, Gainsbourg is hiding behind nothing. You get everything: the obsessions, the lust, the weaknesses, the scars. You see everything ugly and everything beautiful."