A whole generation of southern girls, raised on the promise of Michael Stipe.
Five). The Esher demos are a real treasure trove; they mined it for years. Songs that got worried to death on the album are played with a fresh one-take campfire feel, just acoustic guitars and handcl...
Thanks to the greatest invention of recent years, the MP3-playing alarm clock, I can now choose the song that wakes me up in the morning.
On the 11th of every month my friend elizabeth would say, well we made it through another month. so do we get her back now? we always giggled, but we really did expect to get her back. its not human t...
We have individual geekdoms that we've turned the other one on to and individual geekdoms we prefer to enjoy alone. There are also the geekdoms that inspire us to try to convert each other.
We had nothing in common, except we both loved music. It was the first connection we had, and we depended on it to keep us together. We did a lot of work to meet in the middle. Music brought us togeth...
We couldn't believe how exciting it was to be together, a pair of young Americruisers on a roll. We'd lived for just twenty-five years; we weren't planning to die for fifty more. We danced and drank a...
They made their greatest music in a five-year rush, starting in 1968: Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street. I can’t really argue that the Stones were better when they we...
The only heroic act one can fucking well pull out of the bag in a situation like that is to get on with life and derive some joy from the very simple pleasure of remaining alive, despite every attempt...
The early Seventies were a gold rush for double-vinyl samplers from Sixties heavyweights—the Stones’ 1971 Hot Rocks, the Kinks’ 1972 Kink Kronikles, the Doors’ 1972 Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine,...
Silly Love Songs wanders on for a bizarre and very unpop six minutes. Paul was passionate about music-making, which is different from being passionate about music.
Side One of 1967–1970 is up there with Side Three of Hot Rocks in the annals of great vinyl sides. (Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane, Sgt. Pepper, With a Little Help, Lucy, A Day in the Life, and All You...
PAUL IS SOMEBODY WHO DOES THINGS WITH ENTHUSIASM, which makes people feel appalled and insulted at things he chooses to do. If you’re under thirty, you have never heard of a song called Spies Like Us,...
I've played the song for a lot of people who respond, 'Hmmmm, this is interesting,' but in a way it's more like 'There are two exits in this room, the window and the door. If this song doesn't end soo...
I was looking for glimmers of light, but I only wanted to go looking for them in the hills where the dead spirits hung out.
I remember the summer of 1996, at a drunken wedding with one of my professors, a Hendrix-freak baby boomer, when he was complaining about the 'bullet-in-the-head rock and roll' the kids were listening...
I hear the noise in his voice, and I hear a boy trying to scare the darkness away. I wish I could hear what happened next, but nothing did.
I believe that when you’re making a mix, you’re making history. You ransack the vaults, you haul off all the junk you can carry, and you rewire all your ill-gotten loot into something new. You go thro...
For all karaoke freaks around the nation, Total Eclipse of the Heart is one of those sacred anthems. It’s the kind of song that announces, Dearly beloved, we have so totally gathered here today.
Falling in love with Renée was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece. I had no chance. She put a hitch in my git-along. She wouldwake up in the middle of the night and say things like...
