"My third and final pick is “Grandma,” a comedy about a grandmother and her granddaughter. Her granddaughter is pregnant, she wants to have an abortion. And it’s this very low-key, good-humored… it’s not a movie that tries to be about too much. It’s just about these characters and their situation. The grandmother is played by Lily Tomlin, and [in] this performance she plays this feminist poet and writer who’s just a wonderfully cranky, uncompromising woman. I don’t know, if that is not a great performance, I don’t know what is. And it’s a very underplayed, very controlled performance. The Oscars like to award sort of big, emotional, weeping-and-fist-pounding moments of acting, and there’s none of that in “Grandma.” It’s just such a delight. If I were to give the Oscars advice, first thing I would say is: just lighten up. You know, there’s a lot of really great movies that are funny. And I don’t even wanna get started on the Foreign Language Film category, which is such a mess. The one-film-per-country-rule… Just find the movies from all over the world that are most exciting and most original and find a way to give those some prizes."

"Led Zeppelin, goddamn! I don't think they made a bad record! There's that classic line from Cameron Crowe's movie Fast Times At Ridgemont High where they're cruising around, talking about how to get chicks. And the guy says: ""If you wanna score with a chick, turn out side two of volume four!"" I've used that a few times actually. It works [laughs]! Anyway if it didn't work, it was a nice soundtrack while it was going down. Jimmy Page is another guitar player that means a lot to me. Every member of that fucking band: John Paul Jones was an amazing writer, arranger and producer, as well as Jimmy. Plus John Bonham and Robert Plant... that's one of the greatest rock & roll bands of all times. It's just straight-up, fucking sexy, kick ass and shit, man! All the way from dirty low-down rock & roll to the biggest orchestral tracks like ‘Kashmir’. They travelled a lot of ground while keeping their roots intact, the blues. You know, certain bands really resonate in certain areas and that was one band that was always popular up there where I come from, the Northwest. You have at least ten fucking Zeppelin songs that you can jam with anybody at any time."

"It's this live, spiritual thing from '66 - Alice Coltrane, his wife, and Pharoah Sanders is on it. It's just a really spiritual performance. At one point, he starts beating his chest and making Tarzan noises. This was one of the things I burned - that's more obscure, the others are more influential, but yeah, Temple University is in Philadelphia, so it was very close to home in that regard. There's a writer from Philadelphia, Francis Davis, I read one of his jazz books, I'm intrigued by that guy. I haven't met him but I really love his writing and he was there back then, he was going to Temple, he was at the concert, and he wrote a review that came in there. That's a great, intense live performance. I've always sort of been into the improv thing of feeling it in the moment spiritually, but yeah, I was listening to a lot of jazz records and it really opens your mind, just because they're all such real players. It's all live, it's not overdubs, it's just capturing a real moment of true feeling, especially when you've got the greats, like John Coltrane, or in this case, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali and they're all just such heavy people, you know? It's unreal."