"Again, this song is totally inspiring from a production point of view. It’s hard to choose just one song from Les Paul and Mary Ford, but this stood out. It’s a great song, despite not being a Les Paul and Mary Ford original. When people think of Les Paul they tend to think of the guitar the Gibson Les Paul, but Les Paul basically invented multi-track recording and a lot of recording techniques that so many of us use today. The stuff that he did on ‘How High The Moon’ and anything from the early ‘50s is just so, so far ahead of its time. It’s all guitar, even the drums are just him tapping his guitar and not in a cheesy, Newton Faulkner kind of way, it’s serious musicality. He was basically recording in hotel rooms, using bathrooms as echo chambers and the like. The arrangement on this track is crazy. It is a bit silly, a lot of the stuff sounds silly because it’s all plinky-plonk, all very high-pitched, mandolin-like guitars, but you’ve got to remember this was in the ‘50s. It makes Rock ‘n’ Roll, which was often just three chords, sound very unimaginative. This kind of track was jazz chords and guitar orchestra, basically. I’ve definitely robbed some of Les Paul’s techniques over the last few years. On the new record there’s some sped-up guitar, half-time drums and things like that, where you basically slow down the tape and create a whole different instrument almost. If you haven’t seen [the Les Paul documentary] Chasing Sound, I highly recommend it. It’s about how he invented the first electric guitar, using a telephone microphone and putting it on a bit of old railway track, putting and stretching a string across it and amplifying it. That was literally the birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll."

"If I had to do my top 100 movies I think 15 to 20 of them would be Woody Allen movies. This is the toughest one for me to do because the instinct is to say Annie Hall, because it’s undeniably, I think, perfect — in terms of comedy, romantic comedy specifically. It’s one that, the older I get, I feel like I continue to grow with, and I check in with it every once in a while. Depending on where I am in my life and the relationships I’ve had, I can always glean something different from it or recognize some truth in it that I’ve experienced or yet to experience. It changes every time. If I were like an evangelical, crazy born-again it would be my Bible. It’s like having an old sage friend who you don’t see very often, who’s tremendously neurotic. I also relate to him so much just as a neurotic and an over-analyzer. I fell in love with him in junior high school when, you know, you’re going through your formative years and you’re realizing certain qualities about yourself. So when I was introduced to Woody Allen it was such a relief. He made me feel like it was okay; not only could I function with neuroses but I could thrive. And certainly with women you go through so many relationship questions and struggles and it’s just nice to know someone can take all of that and create entertainment and mine those life transitions for such comedy. There’s a lot of solace in that. But I also love him on a simple comedy level — I almost love his physical comedy and his slapstick as much. So if I had to pick just one, I would say “Every movie he made in the ’70s.” [laughs]"