"I found Devin when he was around seventeen years old and I needed a singer for my band. So when I heard tapes of him singing I thought there was really something there but the music he was playing was bizarre; it was really heavy and industrial and I thought, “It’s really good but I’m not supposed to like this because I like this…” But when he was working with me the poor guy was stuck under my thumb because my music is not a democracy, it’s a dictatorship. I want things a certain way. Devin wasn’t writing at that time but when he went off and did his own thing and when he did… I’m going to use the ‘G’ word here… I think he’s a genius, I really do. He’s so passionate, so intense and – at times – so tormented, but there’s this redeeming quality of deep, deep beauty about everything he does. I think that in the future when people evolve, if they go back and actually listen to musicians of the past, when it comes to metal, he should be number one. There’s stuff in his catalogue that nobody else would have the balls to venture into."

"Yes, there was quite a controversy kicked up last year over the restoration. And while it’s not an uninteresting issue, it doesn’t distract from the gratitude we who hold Fassbinder dear feel when we hold this handsome box in our hands. This is the epic he was racing against destiny to complete; poring over the extras, you can’t help but sense that he knew it too. All of Fassbinder’s period pieces are, of course, about the Germany he lived in, the Germany I would begin visiting regularly just a few years after he’d gone, a Germany at ferocious odds with itself, arguing in the streets and in the papers and in classrooms and over dinner over what sort of country it’d make of itself, even in those later stages of starting all over again—not too long, of course, before starting all over yet again in 1989. An intense love-hate relationship with the German character, with German history and culture, and an ongoing recognition of the inextricability of the personal and the political, for better and for worse, permeate all of Fassbinder’s work; here, all that’s practically on parade. And the fireworks at the end are gruesome and gripping."

"I can’t explain this movie. It’s just perfection. Sad and funny, light and heavy, full of boisterous color and nonstop singing. Probably the most romantic movie I have ever seen. Catherine Deneuve has never been so lovely. I have never been to France, but I imagine it is just like it is depicted here. Maybe I will never go so I can keep my fantasy and save myself from disappointment. Jacques Demy was a singular talent. There was never anyone like him and there never will be again. I highly recommend the entire box set of his work, but this one will always be my favorite. I remember seeing it on the big screen at the Music Box in Chicago in the early nineties and walking out on clouds while also being filled with an intense melancholy. I can’t think of a single other movie that makes me feel both of those things at the same time and has left those feelings lingering inside me twenty-plus years later. Michel Legrand’s score is, it goes without saying, iconic and magnificent. And what this movie lacks in dancing, Demy makes up for in his constant gliding camera movements. As if the dance is between the actors and his lens. Pure cinema. Perfection."

"It's this live, spiritual thing from '66 - Alice Coltrane, his wife, and Pharoah Sanders is on it. It's just a really spiritual performance. At one point, he starts beating his chest and making Tarzan noises. This was one of the things I burned - that's more obscure, the others are more influential, but yeah, Temple University is in Philadelphia, so it was very close to home in that regard. There's a writer from Philadelphia, Francis Davis, I read one of his jazz books, I'm intrigued by that guy. I haven't met him but I really love his writing and he was there back then, he was going to Temple, he was at the concert, and he wrote a review that came in there. That's a great, intense live performance. I've always sort of been into the improv thing of feeling it in the moment spiritually, but yeah, I was listening to a lot of jazz records and it really opens your mind, just because they're all such real players. It's all live, it's not overdubs, it's just capturing a real moment of true feeling, especially when you've got the greats, like John Coltrane, or in this case, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali and they're all just such heavy people, you know? It's unreal."