"I remember when I was in high school someone signed my yearbook - this guy Guy Blakeslee who's now in the band The Entrance - amazing guitarist and he told me how to play the A minor chord. He signed my yearbook, "Hey hey, my my, rock and roll will never die", and I remember thinking, oh my god this guy's a genius, and then I found out it was the genius Neil Young. A genius steal. He probably thought I should have known it, but anyway I think I got the album after I found that out and it became one of those albums that feel like they're your own secret album. My mum listened to Harvest a lot so I knew the 'Heart Of Gold' era, which I also love. Rust Never Sleeps became my personal Neil Young treasure. It has such a raw sound, I guess because it was recorded live. I didn't even know there were overdubs on it. Actually a lot of the albums I chose were those live albums that are what is live, what isn't live?. But on one song on the musical we were stuck on the opening and I went back to Rust Never Sleeps and pretty much ripped off the song 'Thrasher' - the opening to that song. That was 'Fathers And Brothers' - it's just a stupid little simple [thing], we were just going for something really simple and I remember we worked on it all night, trying to get this arpeggiated thing working and we just went for the straight strum in the end, and the engineer/mixer guy came back and said, "Thank god you you went for the simple thing". 'Powderfinger', 'Pocahontas', they're all great. Young is somehow able to pull off these songs all about the plight of American man that would just seem so cheesy nowadays, but I think there was this experimentation with subject matter in 70s songwriting that was kind of innocent and is not really done today. I enjoy the storytelling of Neil Young, the simplicity of it all, and just that voice [that] can sing just about anything and make it sound good."

"Trading Places. Like most people, I don’t love the ending of the movie on the train with the gorilla costume, but I feel like even with that, it’s still a nearly perfect movie. What is it about that movie? Well, there’s a few things. For starters, when I was a kid, I watched Saturday Night Live from a very young age. I was obsessed with Eddie Murphy, and I don’t know why. He captured my imagination. I loved his energy, and he was always such an uninhibited performer on Saturday Night Live, and then later in his movies. I feel like Trading Places is a phenomenal performance by Eddie Murphy as he goes through this kind of metamorphosis, but also, it’s just an insanely funny movie. This image of Dan Aykroyd in a Santa suit, pulling a salmon steak out of his suit, which he’s hid, and he hid a salmon steak in his suit and stole it and ran out in the street, starts eating it, and he’s pulling his Santa beard hair out of the fish while he’s eating it because it’s all getting mashed… It’s genius. So, the physical comedy, the dialogue comedy is top-notch, but also, I think thematically it’s a piece of social satire that I’d love to see more of. I feel like it’s really what storytelling is at its best, where it’s kind of pointing out some social ills. In this case, it’s inequality, it’s corrupt influence, it’s corrupt power, it’s racial tension, racial disparity. It’s all baked into this hilarious comedy, and if you’re paying attention, you’re hopefully maybe learning a little something as well, or it’s just kind of seeping under the laughs, which is the best stuff. Dan Aykroyd’s character kind of… His performance is so great because it goes from really broad and silly to ultimately very humble and human, and it’s kind of like he and Eddie Murphy are playing these characters that have really great arcs that sort of crisscross right in the middle, right? It gets weirdly poignant, and as soon as it’s poignant, then Clarence Beeks will throw someone down on the pavement and just this explosion of physical comedy, and you’re laughing again."