"I guess I’m a sucker for black and white. This 1970 independent classic is from writer/director Leonard Kastle, who took over after Martin Scorsese was let go. Shirley Stoler is funny and heartbreaking as the homicidal, jealous companion of scam artist Tony Lo Bianco. Based on a true story, it held particular interest for me because the killers at one point decide to retire to suburban Valley Stream, Long Island, the town where I primarily grew up and directed my first film, Trees Lounge. I once worked with Tony on an episode of the TV series Homicide and excitedly told him he had one of my favorite lines in one of my favorite movies. After sizing me up for a few seconds, he replied, “Well, that would have to be the Honeymoon Killers, and the line of course is, ‘Valley Stream. Valley Stream. What a joke!’”"

"Every song on the Pretenders’ self-titled debut is so good. The energy is superb; it's a band playing at the peak of their powers. Unfortunately they didn't really last - they buckled under the pressure, under their own personal demons. However this record is just amazing. You put it on and the energy and vibe and Chrissie Hynde’s lyrics and singing are pretty powerful and undeniable. Chrissie Hynde is one of my favourite female artists in rock music with one of the most gorgeous voices in rock. I know that Shirley adores her and cites her as one of her influences - some lyrics of Shirley's in one of our songs, 'Special', is a total nod to Chrissie."

"This album was mixed by Kevin Shirley and I think he did an awesome job because you can hear John Bonham doing more than he did on recordings. I think that’s probably because of the way the songs were written, because after being on the road they’d developed the songs a bit and a lot of the things you listen out for, like the subtleties on the record, they exaggerate them and that goes from the drums right up to the singing. This is just one of those recordings where you can hear them exaggerating the things that people love about these songs and how they grew on the night into some kind of monster and the material went with it."

"Terms of Endearment is always a touchstone movie for me. That’s one of the best acted comedy-dramas that has ever been made. I can never get enough of Terms of Endearment. I find myself watching it over and over again. It does everything that I want a movie to do. I fall in love with the characters. I care about their journeys. It never does anything easy to make me like the characters. It doesn’t sell out the characters for likeability. They all do things that are awful to each other. The relationships are very complicated. Yet, you root for all of them when you watch the movie. A large portion of the movie is also about cancer. It’s treated realistically and it is also hilarious in some of those moments. It’s not a maudlin movie. There are moments in that movie that I think about all the time that haunt me. The moment when Shirley MacLaine is yelling at the nurse to give her daughter more medicine… As you get older, you find yourself in those situations. It may be my favorite film of all time."

"I came across this early on in my operatic journey, and to this day it remains one of my favourite recordings and one of my favourite operas. The wonderful thing about Verdi is that, as you get older, it starts to make more and more sense: these fraught relationships between fathers and sons and lovers and friends. He's so profound in his understanding of human relationships. This opera, Don Carlos, is in my opinion a great masterpiece on a Shakespearian level in its defining, most notably, of the father and son dynamic. There's actually a moment when the father contemplates killing his son – I don't know, but I think that has crossed the minds of certain dads. And as well as Domingo and Caballé, Shirley Verrett is on that recording, who is one of the greatest mezzo-sopranos of all time. So everybody is in there at their zenith vocally, and it's a wild ride."