"I'm not a very religious guy but I suppose if I were I might like the Om cover. It's ok. I love the record though, it's really excellent. I've no idea when I first encountered it. I think I might have heard it before I heard Sleep. It's got a very cool atmosphere. I enjoy listening to atmospheres as much as songs when it comes to albums and I think this one is hard to beat for that. You can put it on whenever you want and it's always going to sound great coming out of your stereo. I listen to it a lot, especially when I'm at home. As a sideline when talking about record sleeves I really hate and completely ruined the album for me, it's not the Om sleeve. It's the sleeve of their previous band Sleep. Jerusalem or Dopesmoker - that's one of my favourite albums of all time but it's also one of my least favourite record sleeves. There's a lot of smoking weed involved and I guess that's something that I think is kind of lame in album artwork. There's just something kind of cliched about it. There's one of an astronaut hot-boxing his spacesuit which is very tasteful."

"Ah that's the one, unfortunately, Lou Reed hated. He couldn't stand it... but I liked it! There's such a variety of songs on it. There's one song on there - [line cuts out; we reconnect] - I told you Lou Reed hated that album! That song 'Who Loves The Sun', how good is that?! The breakdown on it, it's like a hoedown. They called it an album, but this is just an art project! A lost memo for an album... Let's come up with 16 ideas and just whittle it down. 'I Found A Reason', that song, the melody [imitates it] that was just amazing. 'Rock & Roll', I first heard that in my father's car. He had a Monte Carlo, and I thought that was cool. It came on the radio and I was like, "What is this?!" It was so simple and it was talking about a radio station in New York - and I was in New York, that was where I heard it - and I just loved the rhythm guitar and also the soaring chorus, where it's just like three notes and it kind of soars around. And that became an influence on our song called 'Ed Is Dead' - another homage!"

"The first one — I would say Badlands. I caught Badlands in college for the first time. They actually had a film screening of it at my film school. I’d just never seen a film like that before. I’ve never seen a film that was paced that way, that was structured that way, that felt that honest. But also at the same time kind of dreamy and transportive. I remember immediately going home to my dorm room and I called my older brother — who’s kind of my bellwether for cool interesting things — [and asked], “Have you seen this film?” I tried to explain a theme to him, which was nearly impossible of [Martin] Sheen‘s character giving his comb away to the National Guard soldiers at the end of the film. My brother: “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.” You realize that’s kind of how that movie is — you can definitely revel in it and share with it when other people have seen it. But it’s such a beautiful anomaly that when you try and tell people about it that haven’t seen it it’s kind of impossible to categorize or just explain. Badlands — it touched upon a stylized truthfulness that I wanted to do in my film."

"I’m going Empire Strikes Back, 100 percent. My favorite of all of them, hands down. Yes, the dark undertones, but I think you get some of the greatest lines out of it. I think coming up with the idea for Hoth and the wampa and the AT-ATs was unbelievable during that time. It still holds up, which is tough, and I say this as a diehard Star Wars fan. A New Hope gets a free pass because it’s the first one we saw, but you go back, and of course we’ve all seen a lot of the gaps, and some of the stuff is so cartoony and over the top. You don’t get that in Empire Strikes Back. You get a group of guys who came back for the second one with a new director and were like, “Alright, we’re in it to win it.” We’re going to get deeper into these relationships; we’re going to see them kiss, and how awkward that is; we’re going to see Han save his buddy and throw him inside a tauntaun in the first 20 minutes. And you’re like, “Whoa! We’re going very deep here.” And I’m not even talking about the ending. That’s just the first 20 minutes."