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...
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...
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...
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...
THE WHITE ALBUM IS THE BROKEN ALBUM, THE DOUBLE-VINYL mess, a build-your-own-Beatles kit forcing you to edit the album yourself. They even made the audience come up with the title. (Nobody has ever ca...
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...
I’m sure the Sixties Beatles were great. But I bet not as great as the Nineties Beatles.
It's always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you.
It was just a temporary technological mutation designed to do the same thing music always does, which is allow emotionally warped people to communicate by bombarding each other with pitiful cultural a...
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've never heard of anybody getting rid of their prized Exile postcards, much less actually writing on them and sending them through the mail to a girl. I watched these two, laughing over this story a...
I was somebody's boyfriend now. This would mean a lot of trial and error. But she was who I wanted to try and err with.
I thought, there is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment... There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides here in this car, with this girl, on this road, listeni...
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...
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 realize it’s frowned on to choose a mate based on something superficial like the music they love. But superficiality has been good to me. In the animal kingdom, Renée and I would have recognized eac...
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...
Wearing straight clothes but still in costume—as Rodgers summed it up, His seemingly casual appearance was actually the flowering of his next drag: He was delving into the eighties metrosexual world o...
By refusing to repeat it, much to the despair of their record companies. Both wrote gorgeous sci-fi ballads blatantly inspired by 2001—Space Oddity and After the Gold Rush. Both did classic songs abou...
