"The first film is Moulin Rouge! — weird because I’m seeing Nicole Kidman later today, not to brag. I’m pretty stoked about that. I first saw it at a family friend’s house and they put it on for me because they thought I’d like it, they knew that I liked music. But the first 10 minutes of that movie are absolute chaos, like full-fledged chaos. So, I was like, I hate this, I don’t know what this is. I gave it a second try and watched it through the first 10 minutes and then the story started to come together and it became my favorite movie. I love that movie so much. I love the visuals, love the music in it, and just yeah, it spoke to my little gay heart when I was a kid."

"For some weird reason Sinéad O’Connor came back into my life. I re-indulged and reconnected with her and I was such a happier person for it. I go through long periods of forgetting and then I’ll just have major sessions and listen to just that for weeks on end. I thought the way she handled “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the Prince song, was genius. It is so moving and sad. I must be a sentimentalist and I’ve never realized until now. Oh, and Dolly Parton runs through all of this by the way. I’m a Dolly man—you can all knock “9 to 5,” but I love it. One of the greatest tragedies of my life so far is that I’ve never been able to make it to Dollywood. I think I’d have a hoot."

"One of my favorites that I can put on anytime and it makes me happy. I pay obvious homage to it in a sequence towards the beginning of Krisha. I remember showing this to my girlfriend for the first time and she didn’t get it. She thought it was weird. Something about it made her watch it again later on though, now it’s our movie and one of her favorites. It’s a shame audiences didn’t get this beautifully strange Adam Sandler film when it came out. I think it’s one of PTA’s best, even though I love every single one of his films. I can feel his heart bursting through the film, rooting for Barry and Lena. My heart roots for them too. It roots for their strange, beautiful, and real love that we can all relate to!"

"And I don’t want to leave this list without alluding to The Long Day Closes. It’s about many things; it’s about the strangeness and disorientation and passions of youth, but most of all it’s about vocation, the calling of an artist and how early in one’s life that vocation comes. As a boy, Richard Avedon, the photographer, covered the entrance to his bedroom with a dark curtain, punched a tiny hole into it, and watched his family all day long. And in The Long Day Closes, in myriad, tiny details, often easy to overlook, Terence Davies is showing how filmmaking comes to a very young man who one day will become a filmmaker. For some weird reason, Davies is relatively unknown, especially in this country. Why? The cinematography is so poetic. The shots are like great music."

"This compilation is like plugging into a direct line to your 15-year-old self. And somewhere in there is me right now. It sounds strange because I'm now 50, but it never really leaves you. It's just weird how that can energise you. Even for music that's not like it. I can put this on and it's like it gives me power, almost like turning on the batteries. Of course, we don't sound like a punk rock band from '77, but it has that energy that's universal and you form it into where you're going musically. I put this album on the list because it's a power source that got me through a lot of these recordings, and strangely enough I sound nothing like it. Punk rock is the hydrochloric acid where you get that frothy explosion in the beaker."