Quotes from Rob Sheffield

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 things started to wobble around the time R.E.M. put out a truly wretched album called Document, the one that made her reconsider whether she could continue to worship Michael Stipe. I blamed R.E.M. for not saving us by making a better record. That, I realize now, was unfair.

As your life grows longer, and your memory gets fuller, The Beatles come with you, and mutate along the way. They define the extremes of your memory; they are with you when you are just discovering music, too young to know better, and they remain with you, on top of all the other heart noise crowding your chemistry, when you are supposedly too old for surprises.

How do you turn down the volume on your personal-drama earphones and learn how to listen to other people?

I believe that when you're making a mix, you're making history. You ransack the vaults, you haul off all the junk you can carry, and you rewire all your ill-gotten loot into something new. You go through an artist's entire career, zero in on that one moment that makes you want to jump and dance and smoke bats and bite the heads off drugs. And then you play that one moment over and over. A

That same power translates everywhere, all around the world, because nothing expresses joy like singing together.

My favorite prototypical Beatlemaniac appears in the great documentary The Compleat Beatles, in a TV news clip.

A mix tape steals these moments from all over the musical cosmos, and splices them into a whole new groove.

That night, I learned the hard way: If the girls keep dancing, everybody's happy. If the girls don't dance, nobody's happy.

Brother Jim loved to talk about how Jesus wasn't a pussy.

But Ram was mostly recorded in NYC, in a top-dollar studio during nine-to-five business hours, with two sidemen he'd never met before. It was a professional approach to music designed to sound unprofessional. It worked, too, with Hugh McCracken playing that great guitar break in "Too Many People." (My favorite McCracken solo, except maybe Steely Dan's "Hey Nineteen.") For Paul, country life meant stretching himself. He kept featuring

But I loved the cassock and surplice, ringing the bells, lighting the candles—it was like being a glam-rock roadie for God.

And sometimes I think, man, all the people I get to hear this song with, we're going to miss each other when we die. When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other.

If she breaks my heart, no matter what hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now.

We were just a couple of fallen angels, rolling the dice of our lives. We'd heard all the horror stories of early marriages and fast divorces and broken hearts. But we knew none of them would happen to us, because as Dexy's Midnight Runners sang to Eileen, we were far too young and clever.

It you're feeling happy vibes, they're from me, " Stephanie told me after she mailed the tape. "I'm vibin' you real hard. I'm building a wall of love around you, three inches all around.

Sometimes I could feel the glaciers shifting inside me, and I hoped they were melting, but they were just making themselves comfortable.

I would have stayed in 1996 if I could have, but it wasn't my choice, so now I have to move either forward or back—it's up to me. Not changing isn't an option. And even though I've changed in so many ways—I'm a different person with a different life—the past is still me every minute.

We were young and in love and the world was changing

but somehow, it's part of why Stevie Nicks means so much to us. It's why we hear our own broken forevers in this music, why we hear our own emotional avalanches in her songs. When she rides the landslide, she rides it all the way down, and she takes us down with her.

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 just doesn't work." So much going on in that sentence, dispatched with no drama. Maybe a shade of irony, but no hand-wringing—just a change of mind announced as efficiently and discreetly and decisively as possible.

One of her best songs ever is 'Annabel Lee,' which she just released a few years ago on her underrated 2011 album In My Dreams . It's a six-minute sex-and-death trip with a lyric from one of her hot dead rock-and-roll boyfriends: Edgar Allan Poe. The key line is: 'The moon never beams without bringing me dreams.' Poe might have written that line in 1849, but he clearly always meant it for Stevie Nicks to sing.

Even George Clinton sounded befuddled by "Mind Games" when he covered it on the very odd 1995 tribute album Working Class Hero, where he joined the likes of Blues Traveler and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to raise money for the cause of spaying cats and dogs. (You'd think the sound of Toad the Wet Sprocket doing "Instant Karma" would be enough to neuter any animal.)

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 of high fashion, a precursor to what's called 'Executive Realness' in vogueing competions.