Quotes from Rob Sheffield

Tacos will grow on Christmas trees before I learn to carry a tune. Fortunately, it doesn't matter. In karaoke, talent means nada; enthusiasm is everything. What I lack in talent, I make up for in passion. Hence my karaoke problem.

I hear the noise in his voice, and I hear a boy trying to scare the darkness away. I wish I could hear what happened next, but nothing did.

This is what they call "hitting rock bottom," and they call it that because it rocks.

The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with—nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.

Her universe is such a big place full of so many galaxies-100 billion of them with 100 billion stars apiece which means 10 to the 22nd power stars-that it's terrifying to think of the odds that we found each other. 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 are just two of a billion stars.

And they're right—what could be scarier, stupider, than staying together? How else could you totally guarantee that you would always have reasons to be terrified?

Anything can be a love song as long as two people care about it.

But "ma'am" doesn't translate in the North, where it just startles and offends.

Dave Matthews is mixing violin solos with saxophone solos and it's bad for the baby

When you're a Catholic kid, the nuns teach you that when something is annoying you, you "offer it up", as a sacrificial gift.

Human benevolence is totally unfair. We don't live in a kind or generous world, yet we are kind and generous.

You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We're Going to Be Friends.

Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I'm a mix tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.

At that moment, I knew she was the girl for me. Of course, we'd already been going out for a few weeks, so I wasn't, like, shocked or anything. But still, it's never not nice to to keep realizing.

He sang about girls in space-why not? That's where all the cool girls were. (They weren't where I could find them, that was for sure.)

I hate when people question my ability to get from one place to another without mutilating myself. It's tantamount to saying, "Try to get home without screwing it up like last time, dummy," or "Farewell, for I may never see you again, given the mortality that awaits us all like a crouching panther.

I felt indestructible, or at least undestroyed, more alive than I'd ever been.

But I never stop playing my mixes. Every fan makes them. The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with - nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they add up to the story of a life.

My ears rang all the way home and I didn't want them to stop. It made me want to start something.

If I had my way, the story would end here. Renée was always braver. She always wanted to know what happens next.

I'm sure the Sixties Beatles were great. But I bet not as great as the Nineties Beatles.

For all karaoke freaks around the nation, "Total Eclipse of the Heart" is one of those sacred anthems. It's the kind of song that announces, "Dearly beloved, we have so totally gathered here today.

I believe that when you're making a mix, you're making history.

The South was a scary new world. The first time I saw a possum in my driveway, I shook a bony fist at the sky and cursed this godforsaken rustic hellhole. My ancestors spent centuries in the hills of County Kerry, waist-deep in sheep shit, getting shot at by English soldiers, and my grandparents crossed the ocean in coffin ships to come to America, just so I could get possum rabies?