It all culminated in the 1995 Anthology, which would have seemed like an embarrassing defeat only a few years earlier. The record company had figured out how to treat the catalog as a prestige item; t...
I was too scared to talk, but I was more scared to not talk.
Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of life.
Earthling and the next record Hours were so damn good, it was startling to hear them, but it was tough to convince my friends they were worth getting excited about.
But God is the best song any Beatle wrote about religion, with all due respect to George’s My Sweet Lord. Both were produced by Phil Spector the same year—with Ringo on drums. (Talk about ecumenical.)...
At Camp Don Bosco, there were Bibles all over the place, mostly 1970s hippie versions like Good News for Modern Man. They had groovy titles like The Word or The Way, and translated the Bible into cont...
24. The Rutles, Cheese and Onions (1978) A legend to last a lunchtime. The Rutles were the perfect Beatle parody, starring Monty Python’s Eric Idle and the Bonzos’ Neil Innes in their classic mock-doc...
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...
Sending Paris Hilton to jail for being the most loathed celeprosy lesion in the history of the species seems like a happening idea at first - forty-five days at Century Regional Detention Center is so...
Sometimes you can feel like you’re experiencing some of the most honest, most intimate moments of your life, while butchering a Hall & Oates song at 2 a.m. in a room full of strangers.
On the 11th of every month my friend elizabeth would say, well we made it through another month. so do we get her back now? we always giggled, but we really did expect to get her back. its not human t...
We want to freeze the perfect moment, hold on to it, at least long enough to understand it. But it dances on with us or without us, so we jump in and try to keep up. The universe is expanding and we a...
The only heroic act one can fucking well pull out of the bag in a situation like that is to get on with life and derive some joy from the very simple pleasure of remaining alive, despite every attempt...
Side One of 1967–1970 is up there with Side Three of Hot Rocks in the annals of great vinyl sides. (Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane, Sgt. Pepper, With a Little Help, Lucy, A Day in the Life, and All You...
Problems that don't get fixed, situations that neither get resolved nor go away, and annoyances you live with year by year--that's the engine knock of a long-running relationship.
PAUL IS SOMEBODY WHO DOES THINGS WITH ENTHUSIASM, which makes people feel appalled and insulted at things he chooses to do. If you’re under thirty, you have never heard of a song called Spies Like Us,...
Listening to it now is like a personally guided tour through my past.
Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me.
Jesus H. Christ on ice and Mary in the penalty box!
I’m sure the Sixties Beatles were great. But I bet not as great as the Nineties Beatles.