"For my mentor Roy Andersson, De Sica was someone who was looking at individuals within a social structure. His films were looking at societal problems in a very political way, with a very realistic style of shooting, but at the same time, they were very self-aware about their set-ups. I love the scene when the father and son go to a restaurant to spend the last of their money to eat something, and at another table is a different family, with a young boy who is looking at the son. I’ll never forget the way they look at each other and the look of the other boy, who is used to being in fancy restaurants eating pasta. It’s so touching and such a humanistic way of looking at things."

"Doesn’t life go by so quickly? God. 2003 was a big year for me. It’s when I got married and became a father—well, I’d like to point out that I’d got married nine months before I became a father. It’s illegal otherwise. That’s when I was living in Paris, too, so I was mentally living in a country where I didn’t really speak the language so well, and also exploring that terrain of being a father and wondering what I was going to do. At that point, I thought, Well, maybe that’s it: I’ll stop music now at 40. That’s like a nice, round figure. Maybe I’ll try to do something else with the rest of my life. It was a transitionary time, and when I think about the music I was listening to, I think about the music that my wife at the time listened to, like Cat Power’s You Are Free and Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Master and Everyone, which has a profile of him and his resplendent beard on the cover. I think that she was even playing that in the birthing room when my son was born. I’ve tried not to influence my son with music. I mean, there’s music around in the house, but I’ve tried not to indoctrinate him because if you try and push a child in a certain direction, they’ll always go in the opposite one. I do remember him being in the room when a Velvet Underground record was on, and I was thinking, I wonder what his brain is making of this. But he didn’t cry, not even when “The Black Angel’s Death Song” came on."

"I'm the step-son of Al Green, so that's my father in many ways. Let's Stay Together has that tom-snare that just gave it this whole deadpan quality, and then there's the organ work. It sounds like church. What's so special about the organ is that it's got that dichotomy about it. It can sound absolutely angelic or downright evil all at the same time. It's the only instrument can sound like that to me. And they made good use of it. He used the same sounds, the same producer, the whole way through; it's not like records today where people use this producer or that producer. That's what I was able to acquire with Danger Mouse. Al Green is everything. He's everything that I am."

"The first movie that comes to my mind when somebody asks me about favorites is Searching for Bobby Fischer by Steve Zaillian. First of all, it’s a beautifully, beautifully shot and acted movie. I mean, the screenplay is brilliant, but more than anything, Conrad Hall shot the movie, and it’s one of the best performances I’ve seen by an actor of any age in a movie. The honesty and the presence of the lead kid in the movie is amazing. And every actor surrounding him is extraordinary, from Joan Allen, and Laurence Fishburne, Joe Mantegna, Ben Kingsley; Laura Linney plays like a one scene role in the movie. Like a virtually unknown at the time, Laura Linney. And just the story of father and son and the score is beautiful. It is inevitably one that I am always drawn to, and I think it’s filled with hope but also like a real darkness and the beauty of childhood."