"To Bring You My Love is my favorite PJ Harvey record, I was definitely obsessed with her at that point. She was doing something with the blues that not a lot of artists that I was interested in were doing, sort of making it contemporary. That record had a very natural sound, but it also had a real style to it. It was produced. I still reference To Bring You My Love when we make records. I had really come around to Wire and Talking Heads around this time too, and I started to like that kind of abstract lyrical imagery more than literal story telling. It made it easier to write lyrics, because it was easier to hide behind. At that point, when I was writing lyrics it was all about: What can I sing that won’t embarrass me standing up there onstage? And if you could latch onto something that had a cool meaning to it, that was a bonus. But it wasn’t the primary concern. Sometimes that can lead to a lot of really bad lyrics. And a lot of it is about taste: I didn’t know a lot about what Stephen Malkmus was singing about, but it fucking worked. This is when Spoon’s first album, Telephono, came out, on Matador. In the early ’90s I started noticing that a lot of the records I liked had this Matador logo on the back: Guided by Voices, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Liz Phair. They were the coolest label. To be able to be in the same company as those people was unreal. So, for a brief time, it was amazing—and then the record came out and nobody cared."

"I’ve always been a fan of Miguel. I remember listening to Kaleidoscope Dream in a hotel room in New York; there’s this real sexy, urbane quality to that album. His next record, Wildheart, has a real lo-fi sultriness—there’s this weird disparity between those two things, because people think of sultry as being writ-large, with this polished quality, but when you give it this bedroom-recording quality, it adds a sensitivity and a vulnerability that Miguel just has in spades. I love the way he spells out the titles of his songs in lowercase, too. He has a way of being sweetly diminutive and then larger than life. “Told You So,” from his new album, War & Leisure, really grabbed me right away. I first heard it when I was in my bedroom getting ready to go out, which is really important music listening for me. It always feels like a motivational soundtrack and returns me to my teenage self: creating an imagined narrative that usually never comes to fruition. I always think the getting-ready part somehow supersedes the experience itself. It’s better than the party. Even when I’m alone, when I’m still in the realm of fantasy of what the night could be, it’s always better than what the night is. And I’m definitely just talking about going out to very pedestrian events—it’s not like I’m going out to some wild dance party. But music has always accompanied those moments of trying on different clothes, looking at myself in front of the mirror, trying to do something even remotely reasonable with makeup—it always feels aspirational, and buoying. That was the first time I heard “Told You So.” I really thought, “This will be my going-out song for the next six months.” And it has been."

"Then I would say the next time I remember going and seeing a movie and having my mind f—ing blown was A Clockwork Orange. I was probably about 15 or so when I saw that. At that point in time there were no DVDs, there was no VHS. As a movie fanatic, I could only look at pictures and go, “Oh my god, A Clockwork Orange! I have to see this movie!” But how do you see it? It’s not playing anywhere. Eventually it was playing at a college, and I went to go see it at this college. I was only fifteen years old and it was all college people and they seemed real cool. And it just f—ing blew my mind. And ever since then I’ve been fanatic for Kubrick and Malcolm McDowell. That’s why I love working with Malcolm, because he loves talking about that stuff. You can ask him anything, and he’ll give you all the dirt on how… What is amazing for me too, hearing the stories about the movie, is just how much time they had. Now you have, “Oh, you have an hour to shoot that thing.” And he’ll go, “Oh, we shot that in five days.” That Singing in the Rain scene. They didn’t even figure out the song until eventually he said that Kubrick was like, “Do you know any songs?” And when Stanley would be at a loss for what to do, he would go up to Malcolm and go, “You’re probably going to be sick tomorrow. You won’t be able to make it to work for probably about a week.” And they would shut down and Malcolm would pretend to be sick so Stanley could figure out what he was going to shoot next."

"I’d like to say that the television version that’s longer is better than the version that was in movie theaters. Bergman’s my favorite filmmaker, if I had to choose. It’s very much a culmination of most of the themes and motifs of his career that appears as a physical personification in the very beginning of the film, similar kinds of ghosts that Bergman explored in the past. He has his love for the theater and puppetry and there’s moments of hope and joy, but it also just reminds you that humans have certain demons that they can’t ever escape. It’s really rich and it touches on so many things about what it is to be human that it’s really quite remarkable. And as with every Bergman movie, there’s not a moment of bad performance to be found. But I think that the first episode, if you were to watch the TV version, is just Christmas with a family. A long episode of getting to know a family at Christmas. And I was talking with [Home Alone director] Chris Columbus about Christmas in movies and he was explaining how it’s just a time of heightened emotions for everyone. So that’s a really clever way to learn about this family and all of their dynamics super deeply, by beginning at Christmas. And the first time you watch it, you’re kind of like, “Where is the story? What is this? This is just Christmas.” And then the next episode, the plot begins but you’ve gotten to know this family incredibly closely and so then you’re just so invested with them through the rest of the film. Also, like The Lighthouse, it has some fart jokes."