You know the Prince song where the girl's phone rings but she tells him, whoever's calling couldn't be as cute as you? I long to live out this moment in real life.
When George was a kid he used to follow me and my first girlfriend, Cynthia—who became my wife—around. We’d come out of art school, and he’d be hovering around like those kids at the gate of the Dakot...
The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there for awhile, you feel t...
My sisters were the coolest people I knew, and still are. I have always aspired to be like them and know what they know. My sisters were the color and noise in my black-and-white boy world-how I pitie...
It’s a fundamental human need to pass music around, and however the technology evolves, the music keeps moving.
I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language.
But ma’am doesn’t translate in the North, where it just startles and offends.
But with their backs against the wall, the Beatles produced an album far ahead of anything they’d done before. Since these guys were riding new levels of musical fluidity and inspiration, firing on so...
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...
You lose a certain kind 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
When you want to start living, what do you do? How do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to blow?
When I was a junior, my school introduced badminton, which was clearly a P.E. department ploy to get me away from the wrestling room, and it worked, since the first time I played badminton was like th...
To enter into that karaoke mindset, you have to leave behind all your notions of good or bad, right or wrong, in tune or out of tune. The kara in the word karaoke is the same as the one in karate, whi...
The radio tape puts you right back in the original time and place when you first heard the songs. You arethere, my friend.
The dilemma of the eighth-grade dance is that boys and girls use music in different ways. Girls enjoy music they can dance to, music with strong vocals and catchy melodies. Boys, on the other hand, en...
That same power translates everywhere, all around the world, because nothing expresses joy like singing together.
IF ALL MUSIC DID WAS bring the past alive, that would be fine. You can hide away in music and let it recapture memories of things that used to be. But music is greedy and it wants more of your heart t...
I was the only kid at Camp Don Bosco who would admit he was an alter boy back home, so I served two masses a day all summer. But I loved the cassock and surplice, ringing the bells, lighting the candl...
I thought, There is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment. I could count all the places I would not rather be. I’ve always wanted to see New Zealand, but I’d rather be here. Th...