Quotes from Rob Sheffield

I'm much better at bringing out the best in others than in myself. That's just the kind of person I am. I'm the scratchy stuff on the side of the matchbox.

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 way we talked about the road sign Bridge Ices Before Road. I always wondered, If that's a problem, why don't they just build the bridge out of the same stuff they use to build the road? Drema explained that the bridge isn't made out of different material than the road, but that the bridge ices quicker because it's alone, hanging there without the land under it to keep it warm.

Sometimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person's home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. Melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversible ways you won't get to take stock of until it's too late. I felt myself just melting in Renée's room that night.

Some records turned out better than others: Off the Ground quite rotten, Flaming Pie and New and Chaos and Creation in the Backyard quite excellent. One of my favorites is Run Devil Run, from 1999, the year after Linda died

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.

But that's who your wife is, the person you fail in front of. Love is so confusing; there's no peace of mind.

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.

She liked noise, she liked people, and she especially liked noisy people.

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.

There are millions of songs in the world, and millions of ways to connect them into mixes. Making connections is part of the fun of being a fan.

I Saw Her Standing There' is the best first song on a debut album, ever.

The things we used to do together were alien now. Lonesome star, shine on.

I thought, There is nowhere else in the universe I would rather be at this moment. I could count the places I would not rather be. I've always wanted to see New Zealand, but I'd rather be here.

I was looking for glimmers of light, but I only wanted to go looking for them in the hills where the dead spirits hung out.

I was afraid that I'd just ruined everything; it was the first time either of us had ever promised anything. But it felt all right. I guess making little promises made us braver about the bigger ones.

It felt disingenuous to keep saying, "If we're still together next year . . . " since we knew we wanted to be together next year. Pretending to keep those options open became dead weight.

But the best cover has to be D'Angelo, on his long-awaited 2012 comeback tour—within minutes of the first gig in Paris, the whole world was YouTubing his "Space Oddity" with our jaws hanging open. After all those years away, lost in his own personal tin can, D'Angelo came back to strum his acoustic guitar and work the hell out of "tell my wife I love her very much" line.

put the "freak" in "frequently drunk and belligerent.

We music fans love our classic albums, our seamless masterpieces, our Blonde on Blondes and our Talking Books. But we love to pluck songs off those albums and mix them up with other songs, plunging them back into the rest of the manic slipstream of rock and roll.

The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with—nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape.

It was a glorious time for pop culture, the decade of Nirvana and Lollapalooza and Clueless and My So-Called Life and Sassy and Pulp Fiction and Greg Maddux and Garth Brooks and Green Day and Drew and Dre and Snoop and Wayne's World. It was the decade Johnny Depp got his Winona Forever tattoo, the decade Beavis and Butthead got butt-shaped tattoos on their butts.

The real high point of his film career is The Hunger

Bowie's five best albums came all in a five-year rush: Station to Station (1976), Low (1977), "Heroes" (1977), Lodger (1979), Scary Monsters (1980). What do these albums have in common? The rhythm section: Dennis Davis on drums, George Murray on bass, and Carlos Alomar on guitar.