Irish people marry late, as a rule. We have that potato-famine DNA from the old country, that mentality where you don't give birth to anything until you have the potatoes all stored up to feed it. My...
Renee used to say real life was a bad country song, except bad country songs were believable and real life isn't.
Big Star invented a vision of bohemian rock & roll cool that had nothing to do with New York, Los Angeles or London, which made them completely out of style in the 1970s, but also made them an insp...
When Renee and I talked about it years later, we agreed on one point: We were insane. Renee always said, If any of our kids want to get married when they're twenty-five, we'll have to lock them in the...
When I started out as a music journalist, at the end of the 1980s, it was generally assumed that we were living through the lamest music era the world would ever see. But those were also the years whe...
'American Horror' goes for a very specific kind of Seventies suburban downer ambience - 'Flowers in the Attic' paperbacks, Black Sabbath album covers and late-night flicks like 'Let's Scare Jessica to...
The bassist -- always the bassist.
Renee loved to do things. That was mysterious to me, since I was more comfortable talking about things and never doing them. She liked passion. She liked adventure. I cowered from passion and talked m...
….For instance, I hated Pearl Jam at the time. I thought they were pompous blowhards. Now, whenever a Pearl Jam song comes on the car radio, I find myself pounding my fist on the dashboard, screaming,...
Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.
On the way we talked about the road sign Bridge Ices Before Road. I always wondered, If that's a problem, why don't they just build the bridge out of the same stuff they use to build the road? Drema e...
Most of an award-show host's job is showing up and keeping a cool head and soldiering through it, whether it's the Oscars or the Hallmark Channel's 'Hero Dog Awards.'
Love dies in many different ways, and it's natural for the grass to seem greener on the other side. But it's not a competition; there's plenty of pain to go around.
I try to stay in touch with my friends who are far away, and I do a bad job of that, but I carry them with me.
The Chiffons had so many hits better than He’s So Fine—Out of This World, Why Am I So Shy, I Have a Boyfriend—and it’s a shame George never got around to rewriting those.) Just
There’s only the one, see. When you fall in love with a girl, she’s the bloody White Album. That is what you whisper to yourself, when you don’t understand her at all. You just keep telling yourself,...
Being a pop fan is a lot like Catholic devotion - lots of ritual, lots of ceremony... We touch the icon to enter the sacred space, genuflecting to reliquaries and ostentatoria that make something sple...
It was like trying to break up with the color orange, or Wednesday, or silent e. It was the most passionate and tumultuous relationship I'd ever known.
And they’re right—what could be scarier, stupider, thanstaying together? How else could you totally guarantee that you would always have reasons to be terrified?
One of Renee's friends asked her, Does your boyfriend wear glasses? She said, No, he wears a Walkman.