Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I'm a mix-tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.
The world couldn’t have been hungrier for Anthology, with a ten-hour documentary and three huge-selling volumes of outtakes, turning into a joyous global celebration. The Anthology double-CD packages...
The things that bring couples together will always terrify me more than the things that tear us apart. They will always be harder to explain. They will always keep me up later. Love gone wrong has ins...
The Word 'Repulse': I hate this word. I believe 'repel' is a perfectly good word, and 'repulsion' is the noun, as well as the title of an excellent Dinosaur Jr. song. A compulsion compels you; an impu...
Monogamous musicians are like vegan hockey players.
Hours, packaged as Bowie’s R&B album, went equally deep. Seven, Survive, and Thursday’s Child felt like Babyface and Toni Braxton doing Young Americans. The major flaw of these records, one that many...
He said 'My kingdom is not of this world.' So did Bowie. It tapped into the whole Catholic idea of creating your own saints, finding icons of divinity in the mundane. As a religion, Bowieism didn't se...
Girls take up a lot of room. I had a lot of room for this one.
Girls are the White Album and they all have Revolution 9's. They have all that stuff you wish you could edit out.When you fall in love with a girl, she's the bloody White Album. That is what you whisp...
Gaye released Got to Give It Up a year after Bowie released Station to Station—two long grooves stretching into double-digit minutes, blatantly unconventional, with quizzical vocals and rubberband-man...
For two weeks, I lay awake at night and said Hail Marys over and over to stop my heart from beating too fast. I suddenly realized how much being a husband was about fear: fear of not being able to kee...
But the best cover has to be D’Angelo, on his long-awaited 2012 comeback tour—within minutes of the first gig in Paris, the whole world was YouTubing his Space Oddity with our jaws hanging open. After...
But right now, karaoke is one of the places where we go to form our own culture club, which is one of the millions of things a relationship is—building a shared language out of the things that fire up...
But Ram was mostly recorded in NYC, in a top-dollar studio during nine-to-five business hours, with two sidemen he’d never met before. It was a professional approach to music designed to sound unprofe...
Back when people listened to the radio, you kept a tape handy in your boombox at all times so you could capture the hot new hits of the week. The intro would always get cut off, and the DJ would chatt...
What doesn't kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you incr...
What I get out of karaoke is a little weirder than mere musical competence. It's a love ritual that keeps me coming back, craving more, because this is where the songs are. And the songs are full of s...
There are all kinds of mix tapes. There is always a reason to make one.
That’s why I never married. Marriage is lonely, but it ain’t private. That was always my most intense fear about getting married: When everything sucked and I was by myself, I thought, Well, at least...
That’s another reason for its fluctuating reputation: the Pepper that blew minds out in 1967 was mono, but later generations heard it in the diffuse, watered-down stereo mix, missing details like Paul...