I suck at fighting. I have never really learned how to talk and be mad at the same time. If I have angry words to say, I need time to rehearse. I can't improvise when my head's dizzy with adrenaline;...
I often took the bus to her apartment, where we drank bourbon and ginger ale, listened to the music we wanted to impress each other with, which eventually turned into listening to the music we actuall...
I keep my friends around, try to stay close to them, try to treat them right. 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.
I had never been so extravagantly proud of having blood that clotted.
By the time you're an adult, you're used to seeing your friends disappear into their five-year plans. They drop out to get married, have babies, go to grad school, get divorced. They start a band or e...
Back home, my favorite part of Mass was during communion, when I'd stand at the rail and hold a little gold platter under people's chins. The pretty girls would line up for communion (I confess to Alm...
At work she became instant best friends with the Clinique girl, Susan, a Waynesboro muscle-car aficionado. She was fond of dispensinf wisdom along the lines or: The bullshit stops when the green light...
20. Bob Dylan, 4th Time Around (1966) Right after Rubber Soul dropped, Bob Dylan recorded Blonde on Blonde, where he sang this scorchingly funny parody of Norwegian Wood. Dylan unkindly played 4th Tim...
Ah, the bond between English boys and California girls. For those of us who aren't either, it's a bond that fascinates and mystifies. So much of the world's favorite music comes out of that relationsh...
It was R.E.M. who showed other Eighties bands how to get away with ignoring the rules - they lived in some weird town nobody never heard of, they didn't play power chords, they probably couldn't even...
Watching the evening news in 2011 is a strange time-travel experience. 'The CBS Evening News,' 'ABC World News' and 'NBC Nightly News' haven't changed their style over the decades, still going for tha...
Bitch power is the juice, the sweat, the blood that keeps pop music going. Rick James helped me understand the lesson of the eighth-grade dance: Bitch power rules the world. If the girls don't like th...
Whatever music you were into, it was exploding in the Nineties. Guitar bands, hip-hop, R&B, techno, country, Britpop, trip-hop, blip-hop, ambient, illbient, jungle, ska, swing, Belgian jam bands, Wels...
What was going on with this guy? It was hard to tell, all through his forties. He was more beloved than ever, though his new music had no impact at all. He looked divine posing for photos with Pulp’s...
Walter Benjamin, in his prescient 1923 essay One Way Street, said a book was an outdated means of communication between two boxes of index cards. One professor goes through books, looking for tasty bi...
True, there’s nothing as great as A Day in the Life, but 2000 Light Years From Home isn’t far behind, while Citadel, 2000 Man, or The Lantern can hang with anything else on Pepper. The psychedelic Sto...
There are millions of songs in the world, and millions of ways to connect them into mixes. Making the connections is part of the fun of being a fan.
Some of us are born Gladys Knights, and some of us are born Pips.
She would wake up in the middle of the night and say things like What if Bad Bad Leroy Brown was a girl? or Why don’t they have commercials for salt like they do for milk?
Planet Earth is blue. Blue blue electric blue, that's the color of my room. Put on your red shoes and dance the blues. I never did anything out of the blue. Now my Blue Jean's blue. See these eyes so...