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c04406b
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Morrissey was my Mrs. Garrett, the house mother from the Facts of Life, a soothing adult figure giving me words of wisdom.
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Rob Sheffield |
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ddf0387
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You lose a certain type of innocence when you experience this type of kindness. You lose your right to be a jaded cynic. You can no longer go back through the looking glass and pretend not to know what you know about kindness.
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Rob Sheffield |
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4d5dc0a
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The Stones suggested that if you dabble in decadence, you could turn into a devil-worshipping junkie. Paul McCartney suggested that if you mess around with girl worship, you could turn into a husband. So Paul was a lot scarier.
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Rob Sheffield |
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a16d65c
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But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies.
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Rob Sheffield |
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99059f9
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I was totally clueless about social interaction, and completely scared of girls. All I knew was that music was going to make girls fall in love with me.
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music
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Rob Sheffield |
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be7bd7a
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Did I learn anything? No way. But all the things you want to learn from grief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn. There are no revelations, no wisdoms as a trade-off for the things you have lost. You just get stupider, more selfish. Colder and grimmer. You forget your keys. You leave the house and panic that you won't remember where you live. You know less than you ever did. You keep crossing thresholds of grief an..
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Rob Sheffield |
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49ec3e0
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By the time you're an adult, you're used to seeing your friends disappear into their five-year plans. They drop out to get married, have babies, go to grad school, get divorced. They start a band or enter the penal system. They vanish for years at a time - some come back, some don't. Some of them you wait for and some you let go. Sometimes the only way they come back is in a song.
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Rob Sheffield |
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15a410e
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If all music did was bring the past alive, that would be fine. You can hide away in music and let it recapture memories of things that used to be. But music is greedy and it wants more of your heart than that. It demands the future, your future. Music wants the rest of your life. So you can't rest easy. At any moment, a song can come out of nowhere to shake you up, jump-start your emotions, ruin your life.
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Rob Sheffield |
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2191b7e
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It's a fundamental human need to pass music around, and however the technology evolves, the music keeps moving.
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Rob Sheffield |
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16b5d3c
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I keep my friends around, try to stay close to them, try to treat them right. I try to stay in touch with my friends who are far away, and I do a bad job of that, but I carry them with me.
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Rob Sheffield |
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7d899b8
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You have blundered into an adult existence you don't understand, and you can't tell whether you planned it this way or whether you screwed up big-time, though it's too late either way.
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Rob Sheffield |
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83bb185
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Monogamous musicians are like vegan hockey players.
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Rob Sheffield |
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3cd0c95
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In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none of which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman.
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Rob Sheffield |
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33af79c
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I was too young to know adult life is full of accidents and interrupted moments and empty beds you climb into and don't climb out of.
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Rob Sheffield |
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5429b3d
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I knew I would have to relearn how to listen to music, and that some of the music we'd loved together I'd never be able to hear again.
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Rob Sheffield |
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78d50dd
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I was reading a poem by my idol, Wallace Stevens, in which he said, 'The self is a cloister of remembered sounds.' My first response was, Yesss! How did he know that? It's like he's reading my mind. But my second response was, I need some new sounds to remember. I've been stuck in my little isolation chamber for so long I'm spinning through the same sounds I've been hearing in my head all my life. If I go on this way, I'll get old too fast,..
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Rob Sheffield |
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1bdc2a5
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I kept thinking of an old Robert Mitchum cowboy movie where he goes back to see the farmhouse where he was born and finds the house falling apart and an old man living in it by himself. "Lonely place," Robert Mitchum says. The old man says, "Nothing wrong with a lonely place as long as it's private. That's why I never married. Marriage is lonely, but it ain't private." That was always my most intense fear about getting married: When everyth..
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Rob Sheffield |
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9dbb29a
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Like any teenager who reads The Great Gatsby, probably, I was madly in love with the teacher who had opened it up for me.
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Rob Sheffield |
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40f6da9
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I have built my entire life around loving music, and I surround myself with it. I'm always racing to catch up on my next favorite song. 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 ..
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Rob Sheffield |
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e7d355f
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The things that bring couples together will always terrify me more than the things that tear us apart. They will always be harder to explain. They will always keep me up later. Love gone wrong has inspired so many great songs, but somehow, love going right is what's bizarre. It exposes deep freakcraft in the universe. As far as I'm concerned, 'some people are very kind' is the scariest line Bob Dylan ever wrote. Compared to that, his breaku..
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Rob Sheffield |
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28f4056
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Some of us are born Gladys Knights, and some of us are born Pips.
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Rob Sheffield |
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dcceef8
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The reality of boy-girl life gets harsh, but in my fantasy, the music keeps them together.
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Rob Sheffield |
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624e8e1
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I was the only kid at Camp Don Bosco who would admit he was an alter boy back home, so I served two masses a day all summer. But I loved the cassock and surplice, ringing the bells, lighting the candles - it was like being a glamrock roadie for God.
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Rob Sheffield |
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4b0ec19
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Falling in love with Renee 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 would wake up in the middle of the night and say things like "What if Bad Bad Leroy Brown was a girl?" or "Why don't they have commercials for salt like they do for milk?" Then she would fall back to sleep, while I would lie awake and give thanks for this alien creature beside whom I rested."
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Rob Sheffield |
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14a1cc4
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The Word 'Repulse': I hate this word. I believe 'repel' is a perfectly good word, and 'repulsion' is the noun, as well as the title of an excellent Dinosaur Jr. song. A compulsion compels you; an impulse impels you. Nobody ever says 'compulse' or 'impulse' as a verb. So why would you ever say 'repulse'? This word haunts me in my sleep, like a silver dagger dancing before my eyes. Renee looked it up and I was wrong. But I still kind of think..
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Rob Sheffield |
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89841ec
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In some circles, admitting you love Top 40 radio is tantamount to bragging you gave your grandmother the clap, in church, in the front row at your aunt's funeral, but those are the circles I avoid like the plague or, for that matter, the clap.
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Rob Sheffield |
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29b83ed
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Jesus H. Christ on ice and Mary in the penalty box!
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Rob Sheffield |
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132749b
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I don't know what your type is. I don't know what your deal is. I don't even know if you have a boyfriend. I know I like you and I want to be in your life, that's it, and if you have any room for a boyfriend, I would like to be your boyfriend, and if you don't have any room, I would like to be your friend. Any room you have for me in your life is great. If you would like me to start out in one room and move to another, I could do that.
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Rob Sheffield |
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82d2297
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I was somebody's boyfriend now. This would mean a lot of trial and error. But she was who I wanted to try and err with.
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Rob Sheffield |
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286dce8
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When I was a junior, my school introduced badminton, which was clearly a P.E. department ploy to get me away from the wrestling room, and it worked, since the first time I played badminton was like the first time I tasted sushi or heard the Beatles or read Wordsworth. This was a sport? This counted for gym requirements?
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Rob Sheffield |
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cd8373a
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Trying to live in the past didn't work for me, and it's only now that I fully realize I'm incredibly lucky it didn't. Because it would have been all too sad to miss out on right now. That would have turned the past into a fraud. It would have meant all my happy memories were a lie. It would have meant all that time and all that love was a waste, leading up to a wasted future. It would have been the ultimate betrayal of everything I thought ..
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Rob Sheffield |
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11b60fd
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Singing what's in your heart? Naming the things you love and loathe? You can get hurt that way. Hell, you will get hurt that way. But you'll get hurt trying to hide away in all that silence and leave your life unsung. There's no future without tears. Are you really setting your hopes on not getting hurt at all? You think that's an option? You clearly aren't listening to enough Morrissey songs.
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Rob Sheffield |
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d71a933
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Dog love is blind. For that matter, dog love is stupid.
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Rob Sheffield |
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63e82eb
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Last fall, I was sitting at the kitchen table of two friends who have been together since 1972. They tell me a story about how they got together. She couldn't decide between two suitors, so she left New York City to spend the summer in an ashram. (Did I mention was 1972?) One of the suitors sent her postcards while she was gone, the famous postcards that came inside the sleeve of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street. Needless to say, he..
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Rob Sheffield |
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41403ce
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Before I met Maria, I was your basic craven hermit. I spent most of my time in my room, in love with my walls, hiding out from the world with my fanzines and my records. I thought I was happier that way. I had developed these monastic habits to protect myself from something, probably, but whatever it was, the monastic habits had turned into the bigger problem. In my headphones, I led a life of romance and incident and intrigue, none of whic..
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Rob Sheffield |
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042a3b4
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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 artifacts that in a saner world would be forgotten before they even happened.
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Rob Sheffield |
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c6601dc
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I felt knots untie themselves, knots I didn't know were there. I could already tell there were things happening deep inside of me that were irreversible. Is there any scarier word than "irreversible"? It's a hiss of a word, full of side effects and mutilations. Severe tire damage - no backing up. Falling in love with Renee felt that way."
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love
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Rob Sheffield |
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e332d5d
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The radio tape puts you right back in the original time and place when you first heard the songs. You are there, my friend.
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Rob Sheffield |
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aa986c7
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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 mix tape steals these moments from all over the musi..
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Rob Sheffield |
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2e6b39c
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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 and went to rock shows. Our lives were just beginning, our favorite moment was right now, our favorite songs were unwritten.
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music
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Rob Sheffield |
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4a3bf00
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You Like Music, I Like Music, I Can Tell We're Going to Be Friends
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Rob Sheffield |
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37c94ac
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I still haven't finished unpacking - by the time I do, it'll be time to move again.
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Rob Sheffield |
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4029eaa
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Renee and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renee was a fiction writer in the MFA program. I was sitting with my poet friend Chris in a table in the back, when I fell under the spell of Renee's bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star's Radio City. Renee was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how mu..
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Rob Sheffield |
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2f905c1
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It's not human to let go of love, even when it's dead. We expected one of these monthly anniversaries to be the Final Goodbye. We figured that we'd said all our goodbyes, and given up all the tears we had to give. We'd passed the test and would get back what we'd lost. But instead, every anniversary it hurt more, and every anniversary it felt like she was further away from coming back. The idea that there wouldn't be a final goodbye--that w..
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Rob Sheffield |