"We've been playing The Soft Bulletin live, and you have to consider that chain of events where you make a record but then you have to become the people who play it in front of people. When I saw The Who play live in 1977, that was really a moment that changed music for me; it was no longer music, it was like a deeply religious power to me. They were still doing these songs from Tommy, in a sense like they were on Live At Leeds, where it was just utter chaos, [and] utter release. And even though people would say that at the time that I saw them they weren't at the peak of their powers, they were powerful enough on this night. That was a life-changing, fucking devastating couple of hours of music. I walked out there like I'd changed heads. And it's like that on Live At Leeds. They start to discover that psychic energy: they're feeding off each other's energy, looking at each other, listening to each other, letting that be the reason the songs sounded the way they did. And that's hard to do, to be an intuitive musician - you have to surrender and say yeah, it's like this, and that's a motherfucker, what if it sucks? You have to trust that you have it in you. So when I hear Live At Leeds I'm always reminded that these are young guys, they didn't know that they were playing at their peak, they were just playing what they felt like playing. And the way that the volume goes up, and the way they even lose themselves - the playing is so intense that they even lose the tempo - but they leave that in the record and that's what's music's about. It's not just something that's kept in time, it's people making a racket. Fuck, sometimes it's out of control. There's moments like that on 'Magic Bus' or 'My Generation', moments in those jams that I think are some of the greatest moments of that type of rock & roll. There's that invisible energy guiding them through this. In 1970 you probably had not heard music like that ever.]"

"I really love Bicycle Thief. That just reminds me of my relationship with my father. My mother — they were divorced and I was raised mostly by my father. We grew up really poor. Something about that film really strikes a chord in me real deep. I remember [when I first saw it],I think I was in college and I had just left home. It was part of film studies class. We were told to watch it and I remember getting really emotional watching it. I guess it just really struck a chord because it made me realize everything my father had gone through to support us and to be there for us. I just remember that relationship, that father/son relationship and him loving his father so much and the end — his father just constantly trying so hard to support the family and make ends meet, and really not being able to pull it off. Poverty sucks, you know what I mean? And then in the end, him having to kind of resort to something that goes completely against his character, really, in order to provide for his family. And those moments of just pure humiliation, as a man, to try to provide for your family. I remember times like that with my dad and it just really hit close to home. I remember missing my dad because I was in New York. I was away from home for the first time and getting a real clear idea of what my father had gone through to provide for me. I think when you’re in the day-to-day and living it, you don’t have that objectivity, and you’re not able to step back and see the big picture. Then sometimes these really great movies are able to that for you. They’re kind of able to strike these chords in you and illuminate things for you. I think that’s what the Bicycle Thief did for me."