"Sometimes my biggest reasons for connecting to a film are simple, primitive, just about a feeling. Videodrome and Repo Man are two that fit into that category. In addition to the fact that it costars Debbie Harry in my favorite roll of hers, I love Videodrome for its particular use of my hometown, Toronto. Sure, Toronto is used in films all the time, but usually disguised as New York, or Chicago or Detroit. No filmmaker has used Toronto better and more consistently over the years than our hometown hero Cronenberg, though, and Videodrome he shot and set in the downtown Toronto of my childhood, complete with a central part of the story revolving around our local cable station CityTV (as “Civic TV,” the station James Woods’s character, Max Renn, works for), which really did play soft-core porn if you stayed up late enough. To this day, my dad lives on the street Max Renn lives on, and Barry Convex’s Spectacular Optical is a bakery on the same street as the Electric Youth studio downtown, just a minute away, making the connection both past and present. Repo Man has my favorite Criterion release cover art; it’s amazing and designed by movie poster artist Jay Shaw, who also designed the artwork for singles from our album Innerworld. With Repo Man you get Harry Dean Stanton in his first big-screen lead role, Emilio Estevez as his partner, and the streets of Reagan-era Los Angeles set to a classic punk soundtrack. What more would I need to love this film? Nothing. But like with all great Criterion selections, there’s always something new to take from it with every watch."

"I first heard this record when I was eight or something. I think my mum gave it to me and I listened to it everyday. It replaced The Jackson Five's Dancing Machine that I used to dance to all the time before that. Then I started running home to this Annie album instead. I had so much fun singing along to it and I learnt all the songs. Then I got the leading part in the musical Annie in my school, so it was really the start of my career. I didn't think so much about the lyrics but I knew that my home life was not very happy. I mean, even though I felt very loved by my mother and always had a connection with her, and we have a really similar sense of humour, the song 'Maybe' really connected with me, it was my favourite one to sing. You know: "Maybe my parents could be like this, or maybe they could be like that." My sister always told me I was adopted, which wasn't true but I wished it was because my dad was so mean that I would always be like, "Maybe he's not really my dad". So I really related to that song, imagining actually having a happy childhood. Imagining having parents who were happy and in love and really loved me. I related to that sense of longing but I didn't really know why. I didn't think, "It's because my dad is abusive and drunk"; I didn't think that far ahead, I just sort of intuitively connected to that song."