"A Clockwork Orange I’ve seen about 35 times. I remember first seeing that and I certainly didn’t get half the movie, but when I was young, I just thought it was just kind of weird and strange and I really appreciated it as I got a little older and saw it more often and more often. Then it became this sort of like a party background movie, something that just became part of my life. I certainly appreciated the language. Not profanity or anything but its own language, and the visual of it, I really appreciated the visual, because the visual is such a storytelling part of it and the language was so bizarre in its own kind of language. I really appreciate the work that goes into that. This is more like a highbrow sort of snobby film pick, but a sick demented sense of humor is kind in that movie as well. Ultimately it’s the visual storytelling and the language that I thought was so tremendous. It’s an absolute acid-trip fantasy weird thing. I never did drugs growing up because I watched Clockwork Orange enough so I didn’t have to do drugs. There’s a lot of shock value to it, but I really appreciated it for that. It was really kind of interesting for me and it all was put together in a very smart way, I believe. It’s not just sensationalism or anything like that because that kind of s— bothers me. But anyway, there’s a lot of things in that movie that I really like and appreciated. it really well in that film."

"And the last movie I want to recommend is a movie that I’m a part of and it’s called American Gangster. I started to say Man with the Iron Fists. [laughs] Man with the Iron Fists because of the power of dreams, to show that a kid who watched movies and loved movies could one day grow and work with his favorite actors, and bring a movie to life. But that’d be number six, alright? Number five would be American Gangster, because not only is it a film that I’m a part of, but the reason I’m so invested into this movie is because Hollywood invested over $100 million into a black man’s story. This doesn’t happen a lot. It’s a story that captured a time in Harlem when drugs were rampant, music was growing, this whole culture was building up. And even though it shows a negative black man, it still showed the same thing The Godfather showed: the power of family. He did it for family. And it also showed the genius of the black criminal mind when it comes to being an entrepreneur and branding. He had a brand. And being a guy that started a brand like Wu-Tang Clan, when I heard how he made his brand Blue Magic and how he tried to protect his brand, and how he had to fight against others who were infringing upon his brand, it really resonated with me. Denzel Washington gave a great performance, Russell Crowe did as well, and that was a big breakout role for me as well, that movie."

"Growing up in America in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s every Sunday evening there was The Walt Disney Hour on TV and before they played whatever Walt Disney movie or animation that was on, they would always begin with ‘When You Wish Upon a Star.’ This was probably the first embedding of music into your DNA outside of something that your parents might listen to on the radio, this was something that was wholly your own, because this was children’s music. “Your parents would plop you down in front of the television set on a Sunday night and this was your hour of music basically, so for myself, Grasshopper and a number of other people this otherworldly song was really the first music that informed you. Whatever music was to come in your life, this was the first information that was literally downloaded into your bloodstream. “Early on in Mercury Rev we were using feedback and Grasshopper was using guitar elements, because we’d yet to learn how to score orchestrally ourselves, we were just too young. Yerself is Steam was our early attempt at orchestrating but we were using feedback and noise and basically any note we could grab on the fretboard or the piano, because we weren’t really accomplished rock musicians. Like everyone, when you begin you sort of fumble around. “The idea of the layering and the dynamics that are in some of those very early Disney movies, such as Fantasia or Pinocchio was definitely in our consciousness. It was definitely one of the few things we could lean on as teenagers."