"Growing up I didn't have an older brother, so all my music was formed by my mother and father. The latter would play old Irish folk songs and outlaw music by Johnny Cash and the only thing my mother would play was heavy melancholy orchestral movements like Night On Bald Mountain. What my mother would make me do is sit on the floor and tell my father to tell a story while putting on this record. This was big for me. I was probably four years old at the time. It sounded eerie, spooky and epic. My dad would make up these ghost stories but what he was really doing was recreating these children's story soundtracks that I'd listened to! I was too young to understand what he was doing at the time, but he was just making his personalised version of The Little Prince or Tales of Witches, Ghosts And Goblins. So he'd be like [eerie voice]: ""The ghosts would move up the Catskill Mountains..."" and I'd just sit there freezing in fear of these ghost stories! It was like having a musical campfire in your living room. Also, this song featured on the film Fantasia, which was my whole life up until the age of ten. It stuck with me and it was embedded in there now you're mixing visuals. I wasn't into the Mickey Mouse aspect of it, but when you watch the eerie castle and spooky ghosts, this is just feeding a young boy's imagination and this is the world he's going to confront when he grows up. These were all the ingredients going into my soup."

"For me Pavement were my favourite band of the 90s and they really defined the 90s for me better than Nirvana or any other band, because they were shambolic and had elements of all the things that came right before them like the Sonic Youth era and the grunge period. Malkmus was such a literary voice and they were such a great band in spite of being everyone living in a different city. They hardly ever rehearsed and their songs were always thrown together in some way but they made this music that inspired me almost more so than anybody else at the time. I would listen to them and see them live and it really moved me in a very basic sense. I felt it was very sophisticated in spite of it being a little shambling and rambling on stage and maybe that was part of it. They were never really a tight band. They never cared to be a tight band. On stage things were a little bit messy and blurry and that maybe was part of their charm, it showed that that didn’t matter in a way. What they were getting across was something that was nothing to do with whether they were a tight rock band with heavy riffs or whatever. Sonic Youth always prided ourselves on being really well rehearsed. We were super rehearsed most of the time and could really kick it out and Pavement was not like that at all. Yet they were really impressive and powerful in this kind of shambling way. I always loved the songs."

"It’s my all time favorite, hands down. It’s just me. I really love the dark side and one of my girlfriends is one of the world’s experts on serial killers and she has John Wayne Gacy’s brain in her basement. I’ve SEEN it! Next to her sons hockey sticks. I didn’t know anything about it. We were on tour. We were in Corpus Cristi, Texas and had a night off and I always took the band and crew out for dinner and we go to this mall. I guess it was the last movie of the night and we’re the only ones in this theater and when we got out of the movie theater the whole mall was empty and we were locked in it. So, the whole night was creepy because we weren’t staying in an expensive hotel and there was just that little button on the door knob that locked our door. So I put all the heavy furniture in the room against the door. I can literally repeat the lines now and when I met Tony Hopkins — and nobody gets me; I’m just not impressed by celebrities unless they do something life saving or they’re a hero type — but anyway I don’t ever approach celebrities, but I couldn’t stand not to, and he did the lines for me. And then I was sitting next to Hannibal in a make up chair — the movie was called Heat and you know when you hang out with somebody for a long time… Ashley was doing that movie with him, so I had him do it. But absolutely my favorite."