Monogamous musicians are like vegan hockey players.
Last fall, I was sitting at the kitchen table of two friends who have been together since 1972. They tell me a story about how they got together. She couldn't decide between two suitors, so she left N...
The Stones suggested that if you dabble in decadence, you could turn into a devil-worshipping junkie. Paul McCartney suggested that if you mess around with girl worship, you could turn into a husband....
So you get less shy about how hard you have to try. And you don't bother hiding your Kotter tapes. Sure, they expose some of my appalling deficiencies. But my appalling deficiencies are all I have to...
She also told me about the night one of her astrophysics friends went to a bar trivia contest where the final question was What does Kelvin measure? The winning answer was heat, but her friend explain...
My ancestors spent centuries in the hills of County Kerry, waist-deep in sheep shit, getting shot at by English soldiers, and my grandparents crossed the ocean in coffin ships to come to America, just...
It’s the same with people who say, ‘Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ Even people who say this must realize that the exact opposite is true. What doesn’t kill you maims you, cripples you,...
If you freak out over trivial everyday grievances, how are you going to handle *real* problems?
I thought, There is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment. I could count the places I would not rather be. I’ve always wanted to see New Zealand, but I’d rather be here. The ma...
It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing.
I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.
I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language.
I grew up on country radio. You know I'm a sucker for that 'we got no money but we got love' crap.
As the old saw goes, the Irish songs are full of happy wars and unhappy lovers.
Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture, 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties, predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be jus...
'American Horror' is the debasement of the suburban family, the way a lonely kid would have imagined it in the Seventies.
You lose a certain type of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know wha...
You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We’re Going to Be Friends
This is what they call hitting rock bottom, and they call it that because it rocks.
I was a wallflower who planned to stay that way, who never imagined anybody else to be.
