"I used to have a studio in Brondesbury Villas up in Kilburn and there was a little book shop that I used to go to and one day they were playing this record. I think she is one of the great musicians alive at the moment; she plays bass but she plays it with such ferocity. She's a very interesting person to work with because she doesn't think at all in terms of chords or anything. You just play a track to her and she just starts to do something. She comes up with the most amazing riffs that are just completely unlike anything anyone would think of doing. The go-go scene she came out of was a particular approach to rhythm, and it's very contained. It's not at all splashy. It's all about really intricate, tight and accurate rhythm. I was in Montreux in 1995, I was working with David [Bowie] on that album, Outside, and the festival was on. I heard this music coming from the festival place and I thought, ""Wow, what is that?"", and it was her with her seven-piece band, who were the meanest looking people you've ever seen. This giant on the drums, two guitar players with these kind of slitty shades playing the meanest funk guitar. It was the probably the best show I ever saw. I was shivering with excitement. It's so harmonically dangerous. It's so strange what the instruments are playing. If you heard them in the abstract you'd think you could never put these together into a song. They're off on their own trips and somehow they just cohere together."

"This one’s going to make you — well, I don’t know what you’re going to say to this, but Ordinary People, the Robert Redford film with Timothy Hutton, and Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, [has] got to be one of the most emotional films for me, just seeing the middle upper class being stripped of the veneer and seeing the dysfunction within. That film really captures that more than any other, I think, and certainly of that time, it was such a dangerous statement for Robert Redford to be making in a film like that. Every time I watch that film — and I must have seen it over 100 times — I weep. And Mary Tyler Moore’s performance in that film, I’m telling you, man, growing up in LA, I knew women like her… That was my friends’ mothers, without a doubt. It’s so simple and it’s just beautiful story telling. Judd Hirsch as the therapist and the relationship he creates with Timothy Hutton in that film is pretty special. I feel that if that film doesn’t touch you on some level, that you’re not human. Looking back at it now, it may seem like a very after-school-special choice, but if you really visit that film again, it holds up, man. It’s pretty compelling. You got to see that, man, on a Sunday when it’s a little rainy out there. I don’t know if you have a boyfriend, or a girlfriend, but whoever that is, sit with them, put that on. I’m telling you, dude. It’s like… How do I put it? It’s like The Notebook for our generation, or my generation, you know?"