"It’s a pleasure to write this particular piece about Rian Johnson as over the last 10 years or so, he’s become one of my best friends in Hollywood; the perfect person to talk to at 8 a.m. over coffee or at 2 a.m. over some other brown liquid. He’s terribly clever (but never annoyingly so), a good listener, and a generous laugher. He’s also always dressed like a cool college professor, which makes him both easy to draw and dress up as for Halloween. In the interest of full disclosure, I did make a cameo in his “Star Wars” episode and my last movie, “Baby Driver,” is alluded to in his new one. So you’d be forgiven for assuming all this chumminess would result in Rian’s movie getting a glowing review from me no matter what. But here’s the thing. Not only do I genuinely LOVE this film, but it’s exactly the type of movie that Hollywood needs and audiences are crying out for. “Knives Out” is superb entertainment that proves you can please a crowd without ever talking down to them. It’s endlessly smart, fiendishly plotted, and populated with a cast clearly loving every acid-soaked line flung their way. So much cinema is divided into just two food categories these days. There’s the empty calories of the bloated green-screen pantomimes that clog up every auditorium at your local multiplex. Then there’s what I call broccoli films; those worthy, good-for-you productions that can be very nourishing, but sometimes (whisper it) a little dull. Rian’s murder mystery straddles the line perfectly; an entertainment for grown-ups that nods to classic studio thrillers but with an invigorating 21st century overhaul. Rian is making the brainy, big screen crowd pleasers we truly deserve. For that alone, give him all the awards."

"Donald Fagen's solo album is another of those albums that kind of teaches you what it is to be a songwriter. I feel like Donald Fagen did Aja for the musicians, and The Nightfly is for the songwriter. It's very much a concentrated idea. I remember getting turned on to this album by my home girl at the time; she was very much a muso. I would spend a lot of time listening to Steely Dan, and I didn't connect the dots – sometimes you don't connect them on your own. I had to be somewhere between 18 and 22 – somewhere in those years – she played me that album and I remember again, whenever I heard somebody create progressional music that are not normal choices, it always would perk my ears up, if it was somebody that would tastefully do something different or make some really outlandish choices, and Donald Fagen is the king of that. The Nightfly is one of those albums that I can't live without, that is where I come from as a songwriter. That again definitively is what created the songwriter in me, as compared to the bass player. The choice of the covers, the jazz covers, they feel like they were his songs, the way that he's playing them on the album – he made them real special. It was like it told his actual story of who he was, and I feel like that's the way you're supposed to play standards, not the part where you just learn it because it's cool. I think that there's some emotional connection that Donald Fagen had to these songs that he chose, along with the ones that he wrote on this album, and you can feel it. You can feel it. You can feel it. The Nightfly is a definitive album for me."

"One of the greatest gifts I’ve even been given was when someone told me to check out Blue Nile. It’s extraordinary, they are such a great band. And you feel like you’re part of a little club once you get to know their music. They don’t get name checked very often, but I remember Guy Garvey mentioned them when he was picking up an award for Elbow and it’s like, you’re looking out for someone who knows their music and when you find them you have an immediate jumping off point. Hats has got that emotional element. It’s got a song called 'The Downtown Lights' - I’ve got to be careful not to say every song I mention here’s the great song I’ve ever heard, but 'The Downtown Lights' is certainly up there. What I like about Paul Buchanan’s writing is that his songs are like atmospherics or they’re kind of analogous. They don’t kind of necessarily describe situations very directly but he frames them in a different way. 'The Downtown Lights' is a great example, I suppose it’s saying that he wants companionship and that the world of the downtown lights and the busy streets and all of that stuff is a kind of representation of what it’s like when he’s with whoever he’s trying to describe in the story of the song. To frame a love song like that is really interesting. The production’s interesting with them as well - sometimes I wonder if people are put off by that. Especially the 80s stuff, it can be very synth-y and almost, it’s almost, really super middle-of-the-road! There’s something about it that can be really obvious but once you get into it, it’s the greatest gift because the lyrics are so subtle and nuanced. It’s something I revisit when I’m in a reflective or nostalgic mood."

"I was never that big a U2 fan actually! The others, especially Dominic [Scott] who left before we got a record deal, were massive fans. He was a great guitarist - I think Keane would be a really different animal had Dominic stayed with us, he’s a brilliant guitarist. He basically just played a bit like The Edge meets Jonny Greenwood. And the others would harp on about U2, I was a bit younger and I was still into the Beatles and Queen, but Achtung Baby, of all of their records, is my favourite. It’s quite exposed, I suppose. I think that The Edge was getting divorced when they wrote that record and a lot of the songs were trying to make sense of that mess. But my favourite U2 song is 'Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses' and it’s really weird because that has the best middle eight that has ever been written - it might even be like 32 bars long! It’s a total heart-stopping moment, it’s vintage U2, it drops down with Bono doing his posturing, rock star thing, and then it builds and builds and launches into that great chorus. It’s classic U2, all quite pretentious. One of my problems with U2 is that it can sometimes smack of bad school poetry from time to time! I remember someone saying to me, “Oh that line about playing Jesus to the lepers in your head was the greatest line every written in a pop song!”. That’s the fucking lamest line I’ve ever heard! We met Steve Lillywhite when we signed our record deal, he produced that song, and we were saying, "Tell us about 'Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses'", and he was like, “Oh, I’ve got nothing but bad memories about that song! We couldn’t ever get it to work!”"

"This was a song that I'd hear on the radio quite a bit when I was growing up. It wasn't a current song, but it was one of those that had legs, and they just kept on playing it. ""The reason it was on my mind is because I pulled it apart the other day. I do that when I'm trying to get into work mode. I might have been hanging with friends, or dealing with business or talking to my mom, so when I want to switch over to the kind of mindset where I need to be receptive to musical ideas, it sometimes helps me to just play a song that I really love - not one of my own - and pick at it. What are the chords doing here? I'm asking that kind of question. ""I heard the Fugees version - which is what brought it to mind - but the Flack one is my favourite. To get to that place in my head when I'm working, I need to do something physical, like sing and strum the guitar on a track that's not mine and just figure out what makes it tick. So in terms of 'Killing Me Softly', there's this cool trick - this cycle of fifths - where you play a chord, and then go a fifth up, and then another fifth up, and it sounds as if it's going down at the same time. You don't hear that very often, but it's on songs like 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road' and 'You Never Give Me Your Money'. ""At first glance, you might say this is a sad song, because of the tone and approach, but it's not. It's just somewhere to go if you're looking for an emotional experience, because it's pure soul"

" Oswald is probably best known for her last book, “Memorial,” an extraordinarily free reinterpretation of the Iliad. (At public readings of “Memorial,” she recites it from memory, in homage to the orality of the original. I was lucky enough to witness this in London. The effect is rhapsodic, spellbinding.) Oswald does indeed have a classical power: she’s at once a grand elegist and a close celebrant of life, a rhetorician and a playful contemporary—a writer who can describe Hector dying in battle but can also depict how he “used to nip home deafened by weapons / To stand in full armour by the doorway / Like a man rushing in leaving his motorbike running.” At the heart of her new book is a long poem titled “Tithonus,” after one of Eos’s lovers from Greek mythology. It is a minutely detailed, ravishing, and rapturously observant account of the English countryside waking up at dawn—what Oswald calls “46 Minutes in the Life of the Dawn.” Slowly, the light builds and the stars disappear and the woods awaken to the birds: “as soon as dawn one star then / suddenly none then blue then pale / and the whole apparition only / ever known backwards already too / late now almost gone.” I’m sometimes reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Edward Thomas, but the tutelary spirit seems to be Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves,” and that novel’s patient italicized passages (written from the point of view of the author) about sunlight building and spreading across the English landscape. (“The day waves yellow with all its crops” is one of my very favorite sentences from Woolf’s novel, and one that Oswald might easily have written herself.) This poet is, for me, a perpetual inspiration."

"It's an unstoppable record. I nicked my copy so I never had a sleeve for it, so I never got any of the song titles or anything like that. But again it's a very complete record. It's one of the few albums that I can just leave on and it can play all the way through and you don't go oh, not this track again, I hate this song. Everything on it sounds like it was recorded in somebody's bedroom. I've never even looked up how they actually did do it, but I just love that the machines and the loops they used were pretty much standard for the dance crowd, and things like where I would have said oh, not that beat again, everybody's heard that loop, you know, actually they turned round and said ah, but if we do it like this it sounds really good. And the production on it is amazing. Some of the things that are going on with the timings on the compressors and the noise gates, on that level there's plenty to listen to, as well as the songs being great. The dynamics and the editing in and out and the mixes are really quite something else. I wonder sometimes if it's only because I've made records myself that I get how much work must've gone into that to make it happen. But at the same time it still sounds like it was done in a bedroom. But again, they're very minimalist in what they use. They pick their shots. When they do something they make sure it's in the right way and in the right place. There's nothing in there that clouds the water or gets in the way of the vocals or loses the bass. It's always relevant."

"This is hard — to choose five — because there are a few in this genre that I really like, so I don’t know which one to pick. This is sort of going to be [from] an underworld, mobster kind of [genre]. So it’s either The Godfather II, even though I like all The Godfathers — I even like Godfather III; it’s just a different type of movie. But it’s between Godfather II and then also, there’s a movie that I did, and it’s not just because I’m in it — I love it — but it’s a movie called Paid in Full which happened to be a true story about these three drug dealers in the eighties who really made it big, and all this downfall happens. So I would have to put a couple of those in the fifth category. I would say Paid in Full, Godfather II — when Michael [Al Pacino] really grabbed the reins — and Goodfellas. And Casino — I was going to pick two of them, but I’m not. I would say Casino to me — I hated how Sam Rothstein got manipulated by Sharon Stone’s character in Casino. I mean, I just hate how he gets manipulated; that just gets ridiculous to me. I know it’s historic, but I hated that. So those are the three that I would put in as my fifth, in the genre of the underworld. The top of that list, I gotta go with Francis Coppola, Godfather II. Just for the epicness of it. And usually sometimes movies are long for no reason, but it was long for the right reasons, which is very rare. Usually, you’re like, “You could cut out twenty minutes of that,” but for me it was all story. To me, if I had to choose, I’d go with the classic Godfather II."