"I’m gonna go ahead and say Bad Boys — the first one. Definitely one of my favorites. There’s something about those movies that I can watch over and over again. It’s like asking a musician what their favorite song is. It’s so hard. But those are five of my favorites."

"This was my album of 1974, although it came out in 1973. I guess I was always catching up with Frank Zappa. The first album by him that I bought was Hot Rats, and I found that a rather irritating album of not very evolved guitar playing. Frank was a bit of a one-trick pony as a guitarist, but as a musician, arranger and bandleader of the traditional sort, he was at the top of the tree, although he wasn’t unique as a bandleader. There were by then other bandleaders in rock, blues and soul groups like BB King, James Brown and in England John Mayall. In America, Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart were bandleaders of an apparently tough-cookie nature, although everyone who worked with Frank seems to have revered him as a musician and a person."

"I’m not being sarcastic: Xanadu is the foundation of my aesthetic. It’s a 1980 musical in which angsty painter Michael Beck meets muse Olivia Newton-John and an aging musician (Gene Kelly) from the Big Band Era. Naturally, they team up to open a roller-disco complete with tap dancing, leg warmers, and Zeus. All of it woven together – in perfect sincerity – by an ELO soundtrack."

"I parted ways with Luaka Bop maybe 10 years ago—it was taking too much of my time and my money and my house. But the label still goes on. And they’ve done wonderful things, including this album by the African electronic musician William Onyeabor a few years ago. And then they put on shows of people like myself and others performing his songs. They continue to do great things."

"Stroszek by Werner Herzog. It’s such a hard movie not to like. You have this character who has these hopes and dreams, he wants to come to America and he’s a struggling, failed musician but he also really cares about everybody else around him, and he doesn’t judge the people around him, no matter what their faults may be. I like the characters and just the story itself."