"I’m sometimes a little ashamed at how little attention I pay to lyrics, especially as I am a lyricist myself. Consequently, albums seem to mean entirely different things to me to their intention. Music transports me; it allows me to travel through time. When I listen to Penguin Eggs, I am back to when I was going through my divorce, huddled in a blanket, taking too many of the wrong pills and listening to this over and over. Which isn't to say this record makes me sad either. It reminds of the comfort that music can bring in the worst possible moments. This album of sea shanties was a lifeboat for me; it still is."

"Super influential record for the new wave of British heavy metal. Super influential record for Megadeth and Metallica. That was one of those records that everyone should listen to but not a lot of people know about. I think the beauty of it is the simplicity of the British riffing and the general approach to the music. I'm sad to have seen the band fall apart from its classic line-up although I don't know that they were necessarily prepared for greatness, if I can put it that way without being offensive. They were heralded to be the next Led Zeppelin and I get it. But I think internal problems started around when Canterbury came out in 1983."

"I love Thomas Hardy. I don’t think a lot of people know that he was also a great poet and a writer of short stories because he produced so many novels. One of my favorite short stories—and I’m not a big short story fan—is An Imaginative Woman. It’s tragic. People are going to think I’m morbid, loving all these sad books. I actually don’t mind a happy ending in a novel—certainly, it’s nice when it happens. But when you’ve invested so much time and your fingers have pushed through all that paper and you get to the end…well, a tragic ending kind of goes with the tragedy of finishing a book."

"I want to start off with a film you’ve probably seen called Mind Game, by Masaaki Yuasa. It’s a very interesting story. It’s a Japanese film; it’s not anime. It’s very western, actually. It came out in 2005, and critics panned it in Japan, and therefore the producers lost their nerve and shelved the film, which is very sad. I saw it at the Asian Film Festival, and I think you can see it online, but to me, it’s the Citizen Kane of animation. It is such an ambitious and visually unique film. It’s just full of action and full of crazy ideas and surrealism and humor and just beautiful, beautiful craftsmanship."

"That movie for me was my Marlon Brando experience before The Godfather, before Streetcar. It’s weird to be living in a modern world where acting has changed. Movies have changed so much, and yet you can still see what defined [Brando] and his performance. If I told you that so-and-so was the first person to do something 30 years ago, you’d be like, “Well, I don’t care, because people do it now all the time.” There’s still nobody doing what he does in that movie. And so that really changed everything for me. Also, there was something really exciting and sad about the whole political aspect of that movie. The whole blacklisting thing."