"I’m a latecomer to Sharon Van Etten. I only heard this towards the end of last year and it melted me. It’s actually my girlfriend and I’s song. “The song is about Etten bidding farewell to New York, where she was living in her 20’s. When she was leaving the city, she wanted to write a song that was a farewell to the landscape of her 20’s, which became “Seventeen.” In the journey of writing the song she visited these places where she danced or met people and where she’d had these formative experiences of her young life. One of these places was a club that’s now an Italian restaurant. “It’s a song about gentrification, about how a city has different lives, and that feels so true to me and it really resonates. On my walk to the pool that I swim at in London, I walk past this derelict building which used to be a club I danced in when I was 17 and coming up to London. “Now it’s empty and filled with squatters and whenever I walk past it, I feel this pang of something that I can’t describe, but that “Seventeen” managed to encapsulate. That feeling is like, ‘All these memories took place in that building and only the people who were there can tell those stories. Anyone else who walks by just sees an empty building, or an Italian restaurant.’ “I think “Seventeen” is really about that. How street corners and physical spaces can have very powerful human memories and experiences hidden in the brick and mortar. So, for me it’s a song that encapsulates a feeling of loss - the loss of innocence perhaps."

"No other filmmaker’s movies have reached me as directly and deeply as Fellini’s. I’m very familiar with the criticisms that have been leveled at Fellini’s work—and they hold no sway over me. There’s far too much to say about the films on my list, so here are a few random things I love. The White Sheik: Alberto Sordi’s hilarious faux suavity while trying to seduce a naive provincial woman. I vitelloni: Franco Fabrizi’s pathetic lothario, Leopoldo Trieste’s deluded would-be writer, Alberto Sordi’s sad, daydreaming freeloader—Fellini sees all of these aimless young men with great honesty and tenderness. Nights of Cabiria: the heartbreaking final scene, a woman stripped of all physical and spiritual worth yet somehow still able to find consolation in the very innocence and joy that have been denied her. 8½: I can’t think of another black-and-white movie that has so much white. The high-contrast cinematography is breathtaking. In one flashback to childhood, Guido is being bathed and cared for by various aunts. It’s a child’s experience of maternal love that cannot be re-created in adult life—as Fellini later illustrates with a twisted version of the same scene in Guido’s absurd harem fantasy. Fellini always claimed the movie was a comedy, and I tend to agree. Amarcord: Fellini revisits the same territory as I vitelloni but in his later, color-saturated, theatrical style. It is provincial life described by a highly unreliable narrator, where the mundane transforms into the magical. A few indelible images: lonesome boys waltzing to music from a nearby grand hotel, townspeople carting their old furniture to the square for a massive bonfire, the immense luxury liner Rex, Gradisca’s sad little wedding, the floating dandelion puffs that mark the return of spring . . ."