"Jesus Christ, that album is just stupidly good! I didn't know this, but a lot - Ginger Baker, Tony Williams, who played drums for Miles Davis, Steve Vai - it was a supergroup! It's a perfect record, it's like the perfect, cool record. The guitars on it, it just sounds like it's flying! It's like, ""Wooo, there goes Steve!"" There'd be divebombs - he had a Floyd Rose whammy bar - it just tanks - it goes down and then it goes up, up into the stratosphere, and then he'd go really down on it. Jesus Christ - talking about sonics! And it's surprising how many of the drum riffs that I like are by Tony Williams: the first song ['F.F.F.'] on it is just awesome; I would've thought that was Ginger Baker. I guess the producer employed two jazzy drummers! I was listening to this pre-Pixies. I listened to it a lot with my brother, my little brother who's excellent with the guitar. I still lived at home at the time and we would just flip out in my bedroom. He would actually show me [how to play something], because I would be so frustrated: "Goddamn it! What is this?!""

"Iggy reminds me a lot of me. And it's all in that name; it's all in the title of that album. It’s raw power, you know? I like the funk that David Bowie was able to get behind Iggy. Believe it or not, I first saw an image of Iggy Pop at church, and they were talking about secret messages and backward masking - and they had [a picture of] Iggy Pop looking crazy. I didn't get into it until later, but I think how I was introduced to it was 'I Wanna Be Your Dog'. And what I like about Iggy is it's just genuine raunch. And the album seems like it’s all done in one take. 'Let's do that one, leave it, just try something else'. With his energy on stage, it seems as if the studio was just destroyed after that album - or at least you'd like to believe that. I just read an interview with him in which he said he wrote a lot of it in Hyde Park sitting under a tree wearing pyjama's too, which gave it a cool twist as well. I just love 'Search And Destroy' and 'I Need Somebody' as well."

"My first favorite film is The Shining by Stanley Kubrick. I am a huge horror film fan. I love them so much. I’ve always loved them. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been attracted to scary stuff; I don’t know why. When I was younger I would watch a lot of the cheesier process-of-elimination slasher ’90s films. And then I feel like, as my tastes matured a little bit as I got older, I found The Shining, which is a movie that my dad had always spoken about with this weird fear, because he’d never finished the movie. He’s like, “The one film I’ve never been able to finish in my life is The Shining.” So I grew up like, “What is The Shining?” And then, finally I watched it, and it was just incredible. Well, Stanley Kubrick’s my favorite director, so you’ll probably see a lot of his films in the top five. I just love that movie so much, and it’s my favorite on-screen performance of all time, from Jack Nicholson. I think that he’s absolutely incredible. I’m ready to play a role like that."

"I’m a big Marx Brothers fan. And just picking one Marx Brothers film is difficult. But I’ll go with Duck Soup, which has four of the brothers in it –everyone except Gummo. The one is the leader – there’s like a coup of this country called Freedonia – it’s just kind of out there. All the Marx Brothers movies are obviously ridiculous, and rely a lot on visual gags and sort of one-liners. But the comedy is so sort of pure. It is very sort of uncomplicated, simple, and cuts right to – you either like it or you don’t. I’m a little nervous about showing my son The Marx Brothers because comedy has changed so much. And not for the worse — I think in a lot of ways for the better. There are circumstantial comedies… For me, some of my favorite comedy is much more subtle stuff. Stuff that is more situational and circumstantial and character driven than gag driven but this is just old school gag driven comedy and there’s something that’s just so great about that. And The Marx Brothers do it better than anyone."

"Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson. I was secretly thrilled that Sofia Coppola, who was panned for Godfather III, made such a triumphant movie so – it was so cool. I think it’s the single coolest movie I’ve ever seen. I haven’t revisited it in a long time, it just meant a lot to me at the time. Partially, I think it’s like I identified very strongly with the idea of being a stranger. I could talk to my therapist for a long time about this, but for me, it was like an Asian-American movie, because the idea of being a stranger in Asia was, to me, more of an Asian-American experience than it was a white American experience. That portrayal felt very inside baseball to me, and I identified very strongly with it. Perhaps it really is psychologically a commentary on me feeling Asian in white America, but I identified with that situation in a very personal way. It always meant more to me than I think the film should have, but I really have a lot of affection for it. I should revisit it, and I wonder if it’ll remain on my list, but I suspect it would."

"This was a record I got in my youth; I was really, really young. My sister had previously turned me on to a lot of different music but this was the beginning of my own branching out. I was starting to get my own identity. I had gotten a few weird records of my own and one of them was KISS's Hotter Than Hell and this one came shortly afterwards. What a lot of people missed with Bowie was that he really knew how to jam on an acoustic. They were great pop rock songs but were mostly played on an acoustic. Of course he had a great lead guitar player in Mick Ronson and when you can mix that up with acoustic playing, then you've got something really cool. I have learned some of his songs and it may not be that the chord progressions are unusual, as some people say, but it's the exotic chord choices that make the music weird. Some of those chords always make me think of a dog when he turns his head sideways and looks at you as if to say, ""Are you going to eat that?"

"Royal Trux are a band I maybe got into four or five years ago. I think me liking them has a lot to do with just how good a guitar player Neil Hagerty is, but I like Royal Trux a lot more than any of the other bands he was in. It's just that feeling of when you're making music with the right person, a whole genre might evolve from it. They are completely unique and I think that he couldn't have done it without Jennifer Herrema - it could have only have ever been the two of them. That's what's so great about so many records I like... they often have a partnership of two people and their music couldn't have happened any other way. I feel The Horrors are like that a bit because we've seen so many bands come and go in the ten years since we've been a band. It feels like such a lottery whether a band stays together or not. But, on the other side of that, for us it feels like we could never actually break up. I guess that's an odd thing to say. That's about as optimistic as I get, probably."