“I’M A MASOCHIST,” says Paul Rudd. “Most of the music I like is music to slit your wrists by.” This fondness for gloomy tunes comes as something of a surprise, given the 35-year-old actor’s goofball demeanor – in the space of an hour, he performs at least four comic impersonations.
The Kansas native first came to attention with his role in the 1995 hit Clueless. Since then, he’s zigzagged between theater, indie-arthouse films such as The Shape of Things and Wet Hot American Summer and mainstream fare, including a part on Friends as Mike, Phoebe’s boyfriend and eventual husband. This summer, Rudd plays smarmy ‘70s newscaster alongside Will Ferrell in the comedy Anchorman, a job that called for a luxurious Burt Reynolds-esque mustache. “I totally wanted to keep it,” the actor says, muttering up faux indignation, “but fuckin’ Friends made me shave it off.”
Perhaps it’s due to the black coffee he drinks in an Italian restaurant a few blocks away from the Greenwich Village apartment he shares with his wife, but Rudd becomes quite animated, rocking back and forth in his seat, when it comes time to discuss his record collection. An avowed music fiend, his early jobs included stints working in a CD store as a bar mitzvah DJ (“In regard to what I played, well, it only takes one word: Hammer”). Compiling his list proved excruciating. “I knew it would take me a while, because I’m not that unlike John Cusack’s character in High Fidelity,” he admits. “I don’t know, naively, it would be like Sophie’s Choice.”

STEVE MARTIN
A Wild and Crazy Guy
“This influenced me more than anything. It dawned on me: ‘Wow, he’s making a living by talking – what a cool job!’ I listened to it recently and still knew all the words. He came backstage at a play I was in, but I couldn’t say much. I almost didn’t want to meet him – he was too important.”

STRAY CATS
Built for Speed
“I went through a big Stray Cats phase in seventh grade – combed my hair in a pompadour, wore white T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up. My first concert was Stray Cats. My dad agreed to take me because it reminded him of the music he listened to when he was a kid, so he thought he could stand it.”

The MAGNETIC FIELDS
69 Love Songs
“Courtney Love told me to get this album. We met doing the movie 200 Cigarettes and always talked music. This is a masterpiece. I find it impossible to get sick of it – when I look back over the last four years of my life, this has been the soundtrack to all the highs and lows.”

TOM WAITS
RAIN DOGS
“When I was 24, a close friend of mine died in a car wreck. We were both huge Tom Waits fans. I had the five-disc CD palyer, and I had Tom Waits records going 24 hours a day so Justin could listen to thim, too. Tom Waits filled the role of grief counselor for me.”

ELVIS COSTELLO
Imperial Bedroom
“This reminds me of a trip I took to Greece while I was a student at the University of Kansas. I was on a ferry from Athens to Santorini, listening to this album on my Walkman. All the stars aligned in this perfect moment, which I’ve been trying to recapture ever since. With limited success.”

GLEN CAMPBELL
Wichita Lineman
“’Wichita Lineman’ is my favorite love song. I’ve sung it at karaoke way too many times. Probably the first album I ever bought was a Gen Campbell record. I was into the movie Convoy, too. I learned the DB lingo and would slip it into conversation. ‘Ten-one-hundred’ meant you had to pee.”

R.E.M.
Reckoning “Before this came out, I was into anything with synthesizers. I was crazy about Depeche Mod, Yaz and Blancmange. But when I first heard this, I thought, ‘Damn, now I get why people really like guitars!’ That was a bar mitzvah album for me – not that I got it for my bar mitzvah, but I became a man that day.”

THE POGUES
Best of the Pogues “In my early twenties, I went to Ireland by myself. I was just like every idiotic American growing a beard and drinking Guinness. But none of that mattered, because there was another pure moment: listenening to the Pogues on my Walkman on the rocks of Dingle, thinking, ‘It just doesn’t get any better than this.’”

STEVIE WONDER
At the Close of a Century
“Stevie is my favorite singer ever. The only thing I never erase from my TiVo is this show I taped two years ago, Glen Campbell’s Goodtime Hour, where Stevie does ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with Glen Campbell. That one clip justifies the entire existence of my TiVo.

RADIOHEAD
Ok Computer
“This came out when I was filming The Object of my Affection, and I remember racing to Tower Records to buy it the day it came out, running back to my trailer and not coming out until I’d heard it all the way through. Nothing else went into my CD player for two years. I was so into it, I developed lazy eye.”

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