"I love all the early stuff - the work rate was insane. In the time we took to do two hi hats on Hysteria they'd done an entire album. Mott was when they really got it together. I didn't think the album they did with Bowie - All The Young Dudes - was a great album. It had its moments but you could tell Bowie had put all his efforts into the one song: the rest of it was a little bit thin. Cut to a year later and they're in on their own and they're basically pushed to the deep end - sink or swim. Everybody in the media had said 'what are you going to do without Bowie?!' but Ian stepped up to the plate, he really did. He came up with truly brilliant songs. Stuff like 'Violence' was taken to a completely new place, with Graham Prescott playing violin. He'd worked with Elton John. Then it ends with the most beautifully understated song 'I Wish I Was Your Mother' - the lyric, the title even. It's a really well made record. I remember Mutt used to test speakers with 'All The Way From Memphis'. As did Roy Thomas Baker, as a matter of fact. They proved they could stand alone with this one."

"I’m a fan of Ed Norton. He had quite an amazing double act this year with Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel. I remember I read the script of Birdman at one point and I thought it was brilliant, but then when I saw his performance… I mean, it’s wonderful when you’ve read something and when you then see the performance, you go, “There’s no way anyone else could have done that but Ed Norton.” I thought he was very, very good.What I love about Birdman is that most movies — when I see movies and television shows — dramatic things happen, and then people act dramatically, and sometimes you go, “Would you really do that?” Horrible things happen all our lives; we all experience loss and death and trauma. Usually, most people, I think, we just get on with it. We don’t have a whole soliloquy in the middle of something. [laughs] You just deal with life, right? But then when you see Birdman, one of the places where it actually works is in the theater, because people are so dramatic. That’s just the way it is. So it was very true in that movie. Of course, on a technical level, that movie was just insane."

"The connection is kind of obvious! Obviously, I sing for the band and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was the reason why I got asked to sing for the band. I sang this song for my American Idol audition about nine years ago and it has a personal significance in that way. “I remember hearing it for the first time. I grew up doing musicals and the theatricality of it resonated with me at a young age, hearing a song that was considered a rock classic but that was theatrical and so vocal, it just really appealed to me. It felt like something and I connected with it. ""I love the different sections of it. Just when you think you've got the song figured out, it switches gears and goes in a totally different direction, or it goes to the opera section - which is totally insane and out there. Then they finish it off with the searing rock section of the song and then it finishes up again, back into the piano-driven, melodic, quiet place. “Much like a play or an opera, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ has acts, it has different sections and being a performer, I think that just really appealed to me."

"Beastie Boys and David Bowie are two of my favorite artists. The David Bowie album I am going to choose is Scary Monsters, which is kind of different. He always reinvented himself and he was doing something in the 1980s with Scary Monsters that nobody was doing. You can kind of hear stuff on that album that a lot of groups are doing now like, 'Aw, yeah I know where you got that from. That’s off that album.' It’s not one of his most popular albums to everybody, but I think it’s my favorite. There was a song on that, ‘Teenage Wildlife,’ and if you don’t like that, we don’t have to associate with each other. If you don’t get that song—it's cool man, I’ll see you around. “‘Teenage Wildlife’ is just epic. It’s like five or six minutes long and it kind of crescendos and builds into this insane vocal of Bowie wailing. I think I would pay $5,000 dollars to see footage of that recording session. I don’t know how he hits the notes that he’s doing and how long he does it but he’s just belting it out. You know he was feeling something when he was doing it. It’s just a cool song."

"People kept saying that Odessey and Oracle was a forgotten classic and that The Zombies never got the attention they deserve, that’s when I checked them out and this song really stood out to me. It’s just on the right side of being over the top, because he’s picked this unsettling line - 'My hands won’t stop shaking,' - and he’s just repeating it again and again and the repetition alone is so powerful. “It’s not judging, it’s not saying what was so terrible, just that his hands won’t stop shaking. The more times you hear that the more you think, 'Why? What the hell’s going on?' I think that’s much more powerful than some big description about what happened, or even how he’s feeling about it. “It’s definitely something I’ve used lots of times in our songs, repeating something that might not seem that big, but once you’ve heard it a few times it starts to play with your mind a bit. Meaning becomes doubled and tripled and you begin to wonder why they’re repeating it. It’s a weird thing to do, repeating yourself; if you’re talking to someone, it’s kind of insane. I like the insanity that comes across in that."

"Harvey is one of my all-time favorite films. This movie I saw when I was younger and I feel like it struck a chord with me, then, probably primarily because of Jimmy Stewart’s performance and the kind of magic that is this character that he refers to that we don’t see as an audience. But I think… I loved it and I’ve watched it many times since, and it’s a movie that has gotten more profound for me as I’ve gotten older, and I feel I’ve gotten different things out of it every time. It’s a movie whose construct is kind of up for interpretation, I think. You could easily make an argument that his character of Elwood Dowd is a drunk, for instance, and, you know, Harvey is a manifestation of that. You could say he’s a man who has given up on reality and, therefore, he’s happier, and Harvey is a manifestation of that. It’s such a beautiful film and there’s such humanity in the film and there’s something so enlightened — regardless of what is actually genuinely going on with Elwood’s character — there’s something so enlightened about him that everyone else is actually more insane than he is, and that always really struck a chord with me."