Quotes About Music

I made a new friend in the summer of 1999 who wore a rubber band around her wrist with Paul Westerberg's name written on it. Her favorite song was "Unsatisfied" and she gave the song back to me, without knowing she was doing it, and soon I loved it as much as ever.

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 handclaps

The songs were all either fast or sad. Because all songs should be either fast or sad.

They asked me what sonically I could bring to the table, and I told them about this new gadget I had just bought, the Eventide Harmonizer. They asked what it did, and I said, it fucks with the fabric of time.

That's another reason for its fluctuating reputation: the Pepper that blew minds out in 1967 was mono, but later generations heard it in the diffuse, watered-down stereo mix, missing details like Paul's scatting at the end of the "Pepper" reprise. The mono version was the one the Beatles, Martin, and Emerick spent three weeks mixing. The stereo mix was a quickie afterthought, with none of the Beatles involved or even present

I'd have too much John ("Oh Yoko!," "I'm Steppin' Out," "Oh My Love," "New York City," "Nobody Told Me") and too much Paul ("Jet," "Friends to Go," "Flaming Pie," "Too Many People," "We Got Married," "Simple as That," "Hi, Hi, Hi," "You Gave Me the Answer").

Ziggy was a requiem: Bowie came to bury the sixties, not praise them. He hit the road and toured like a madman, spreading the glitter gospel in a rock scene full of interchangeable flannel-and-denim sincerity pimps.

Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together and

THE WHITE ALBUM IS THE BROKEN ALBUM, THE DOUBLE-VINYL mess, a build-your-own-Beatles kit forcing you to edit the album yourself. They even made the audience come up with the title. (Nobody has ever called it The Beatles.) In the predigital days, everybody made their own cassette for actual listening, with each fan taping a different playlist.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Listening to music—it takes time. Human bodies respond to music over time in different ways, and that's where the surprises are.

You've Really Got a Hold on Me" and "Money (That's What I Want)," but for me "Please Mr. Postman" houses them both. It's another blizzard of oh yeah screams—in America "Please Mr. Postman" was on The Beatles' Second Album alongside "She Loves You" and "I'll Get You," making it a concept album about the word "yeah.

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.

The Chiffons had so many hits better than "He's So Fine"—"Out of This World," "Why Am I So Shy," "I Have a Boyfriend"—and it's a shame George never got around to rewriting those.) Just