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...
It started off as a playful fantasy we talked about. Then the fantasy became a plan, the way fantasies sometimes do, and the plan became a future. It didn't hit us as the climax of anything, just the...
I remember the summer of 1996, at a drunken wedding with one of my professors, a Hendrix-freak baby boomer, when he was complaining about the 'bullet-in-the-head rock and roll' the kids were listening...
I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language. Without her to talk to, there was nothing to say.
I always envied my friends who had older siblings who could guide them through the teenage wasteland.
Falling in love with Renée was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece. I had no chance. She put a hitch in my git-along. She wouldwake up in the middle of the night and say things like...
Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.
But for me, if we're talking about romance, cassettes wipe the floor with MP3s. This has nothing to do with superstition, or nostalgia. MP3s buzz straight to your brain. That's part of what I love abo...
Five). The Esher demos are a real treasure trove; they mined it for years. Songs that got worried to death on the album are played with a fresh one-take campfire feel, just acoustic guitars and handcl...
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...
I’m very expressive.i deserve to feel pretty.i kissed the blarney stone.i am strong. i am brave.im a good friend. I’m a good sister. I’m a good wife. i am a good in-law. I’m a good daughter. i am a go...
Always loved this sentence in Our Bodies, Ourselves, the Eighties edition I had in college: The previous edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves included a brief section on astrological birth control, which...
[H]e asked Renee, What does rock and roll have today that it didn’t have in the sixties? Renee said, Tits, which in retrospect strikes me as not a bad one-word off-the-dome answer at all. The nineties...
We couldn't believe how exciting it was to be together, a pair of young Americruisers on a roll. We'd lived for just twenty-five years; we weren't planning to die for fifty more. We danced and drank a...
The early Seventies were a gold rush for double-vinyl samplers from Sixties heavyweights—the Stones’ 1971 Hot Rocks, the Kinks’ 1972 Kink Kronikles, the Doors’ 1972 Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine,...
Sometimes great tunes happen to bad times, and when the bad time is over, not all the tunes get to move on with you.
Some people like to make workout tapes and take them to the gym, but I can’t fathom why. Any music I hear in a gym is ruined forever.
Silly Love Songs wanders on for a bizarre and very unpop six minutes. Paul was passionate about music-making, which is different from being passionate about music.
It’s not human to let go of love, even when it’s dead. We expected one of these monthlyanniversaries to be the Final Goodbye. We figured that we’d said all our goodbyes, and given up all the tears we...
I've played the song for a lot of people who respond, 'Hmmmm, this is interesting,' but in a way it's more like 'There are two exits in this room, the window and the door. If this song doesn't end soo...