Are Albums Put In Quotes

I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

Because . . . most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don't have any of that. There's nothing between you and despair, and you don't seem a very desperate person.' 'Too stupid.' 'You're not stupid. So why don't you ever put your head in the oven?' 'I don't know. There's always a new Nirvana album to look forward to, or something happening in NYPD Blue to make you want to watch the next episode.' 'Exactly.' 'That's the point? NYPD Blue? Jesus.' It was worse than he thought. 'No, no. The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point. I don't know if you even realize it, but on the quiet you don't think life's too bad. You love things. Telly. Music. Food.

I've seen the wedding pictures, my mother put them in an album. She looks at them regularly, she must like to remember her youth. (Or else she confuses youth with happiness, as people frequently do.)

The second prong in my revised Trinity is IKEA, the Swedish home store monolith. If you're unfamiliar, they carry every single thing you could possibly ever need to fill your home and garden at low, low prices, but in obscure Swedish sizes so those items won't coordinate with anything else you own, like, say, if you want to put a regular Target lamp shade on your IKEA lamp. Fletch thinks it's Sweden's master plan to make Americans so busy trying to construct furniture with Allen wrenches that we don't notice they've invaded us. (Personally, I think it's payback; the Swedes are pissed that we aren't buying ABBA albums anymore.)

Dear Daniel, How do you break up with your boyfriend in a way that tells him, "I don't want to sleep with you on a regular basis anymore, but please be available for late night booty calls if I run out of other options"? Lily Charlotte, NC Dear Lily, The story's so old you can't tell it anymore without everyone groaning, even your oldest friends with the last of their drinks shivering around the ice in their dirty glasses. The music playing is the same album everyone has. Those shoes, everybody has the same shoes on. It looked a little like rain so on person brought an umbrella, useless now in the starstruck clouded sky, forgotten on the way home, which is how the umbrella ended up in her place anyway. Everyone gets older on nights like this. And still it's a fresh slap in the face of everything you had going, that precarious shelf in the shallow closet that will certainly, certainly fall someday. Photographs slipping into a crack to be found by the next tenant, that one squinter third from the left laughing at something your roommate said, the coaster from that place in the city you used to live in, gone now. A letter that seemed important for reasons you can't remember, throw it out, the entry in the address book you won't erase but won't keep when you get a new phone, let it pass and don't worry about it. You don't think about them; "I haven't thought about them in forever," you would say if anybody brought it up, and nobody does." You think about them all the time. Close the book but forget to turn off the light, just sit staring in bed until you blink and you're out of it, some noise on the other side of the wall reminding you you're still here. That's it, that's everything. There's no statue in the town square with an inscription with words to live by. The actor got slapped this morning by someone she loved, slapped right across the face, but there's no trace of it on any channel no matter how late you watch. How many people--really, count them up--know where you are? How many will look after you when you don't show up? The churches and train stations are creaky and the street signs, the menus, the writing on the wall, it all feels like the wrong language. Nobody, nobody knows what you're thinking of when you lean your head against the wall. Put a sweater on when you get cold. Remind yourself, this is the night, because it is. You're free to sing what you want as you walk there, the trees rustling spookily and certainly and quietly and inimitably. Whatever shoes you want, fuck it, you're comfortable. Don't trust anyone's directions. Write what you might forget on the back of your hand, and slam down the cheap stuff and never mind the bad music from the window three floors up or what the boys shouted from the car nine years ago that keeps rattling around in your head, because you're here, you are, for the warmth of someone's wrists where the sleeve stops and the glove doesn't quite begin, and the slant of the voice on the punch line of the joke and the reflection of the moon in the water on the street as you stand still for a moment and gather your courage and take a breath before stealing away through the door. Look at it there. Take a good look. It looks like rain. Love, Daniel Handler

In 2009, we’d put on the first-ever White House poetry and spoken-word event, listening as a young composer named Lin-Manuel Miranda stood up and astonished everyone with a piece from a project he was just beginning to put together, describing it as a “concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop…Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton.

Edie Sedgwick didn’t really fit in on this planet. She didn’t fit in anywhere. She’d spent years in mental institutions, she took far too many drugs and yet she was destined to make an impression on just about everyone who ever met her, so much so that they wanted to write about her, sing about her, put her photos on album covers and, of course, film her.

slip off my bed and scurry over to the corner of my room where I set up my record player, putting on the Fine Line album from Harry Styles.

Loving a band with all your heart is something you understand when it happens to you. On the surface, others can see its a petty obsession, but they'll just never know the feeling of putting so much fail into a few people on the other side of the world. It's hard to explain it to them, the listening to a song after song on repeat, the waits for new albums, the excitement and surreal sensation when you finally see them live. They don't understand why the lyric books give you a sense of comfort, or why you paste photos of them on your bedroom walls. And they can't understand why one band could matter to you so much. And you think to yourself ‘Because they saved my life’. But you say nothing, because thy wouldn't understand.

We'd grown up in a three-year long embrace, and as careful as I'd been about documenting it, I guess I'd never really taken the time to look through the album after I had put it together.

When I started everything, and by everything, I mean life, suicide was a joke. If I have to ride in that car with you, I'll slash my wrists with a butter knife. It was as real as a unicorn. No, less than that. It was as real as the explosion around an animated coyote. A hundred thousand people threaten to kill themselves every day and make a hundred thousand other people laugh, because like a cartoon, it's funny and meaningless. Gone even before you turn off the TV. Then it was a disease. Something other people got, if they lived someplace dirty enough to get the infection under their nails. It was not a pleasant dinner table conversation, Cole, and like the flu, it only killed the weak. If you'd been exposed, you didn't talk about it. Wouldn't want to put other people off their feed. It wasn't until high school that it became a possibility. Not an immediate one, not like It is a possibility I will download this album because the guitar is so sick it makes me want to dance, but possibility in the way that some people said when they grew up, they might be a fireman or an astronaut or a CPA who works late every single weekend while his wife has an affair with the guy who drives the DHL truck. It became a possibility like Maybe when I grow up, I will be dead.

Music can dig, you know? It can take a shovel to your chest and just start digging until it hits something. That night, singing that, just reaffirmed that I wanted to put out an album of my own songs.

But maybe every life looked wonderful if all you saw was the photo albums. People always obediently smiled and tilted their heads when a camera was put in front of them. Perhaps seconds after the shutter clicked, she and Nick sprang apart, avoiding each other’s eyes, their smiles replaced by snarls. She

Even furious, Mrs. M looked put together. Luce had grown up with women like her: showgirls and burlesque performers who understood the transformational power of vivid makeup and structurally sound underwear.

Renée and I met at a bar called the Eastern Standard in Charlottesville, Virginia. I had just moved there to study English in grad school. Renée 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 Renée’s bourbon-baked voice. The bartender put on Big Star’s Radio City. Renée was the only other person in the room who perked up. We started talking about how much we loved Big Star. It turned out we had the same favorite Big Star song – the acoustic ballad Thirteen. She’d never heard their third album, Sister Lovers. So naturally, I told her the same thing I’d told every other woman I’d ever fallen for: “I’ll make you a tape!

But when you’re a part of something as big as that album ended up being…you want to know if you were an integral part. You want to believe they couldn’t have done it without you. Billy never did put much effort into making everyone feel integral.

Maybe it’s an attention-span thing. Music is now the backdrop to our lives rather than an event in itself. We put on a CD while we’re doing something else. I can’t remember the last time I put on an album and listened to it in a chair with my eyes closed.

The 1976 album, Rising, is a fucking classic and you should put this book down, fire up the internet and listen to it.

...my mother put them in an album. She looks at them regularly, she must like to remember her youth. (Or else she confuses youth with happiness, as people frequently do.)

an institution is where they put Aunt Maggy when she began collecting Wheaties in a stamp album.

It could all be an act,” Darlington growled. “Should I put on some tunes?” Tripp asked. “I have this amazing Red Hot Chili Peppers double album—” Maybe they should kill him.

On the shelves behind him—between The Rainmakers’ first album and Rank and File’s debut—he had both Ramones and his favourite, Rocket to Russia. Harry pulled the black vinyl disc out and put Road to Ruin on the turntable.

Have you always felt unseen, ignored, or unloved? Congratulations! You're the perfect prey for narcissists who feed off of blind worship and internal sadness. You'll never convince the target of your obsession that your love is what Sade was singing about on that one album. But oh, you will try. And in doing so, you will damage your self esteem. And then, once you will wake up from the stupid spell you put on yourself, you can rail against those narcissists, but it won't affect them. So it's better just to skip ahead to the part where you admit that you're the one who bought the ticket to their show. Choose to want to figure out why you do these things and how to stop. In the end, it's all you can do.

It appears that some part of Slothrop ran into the AWOL Džabajev one night in the heart of downtown Niederschaumdorf. (Some believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so, there's no telling which of the Zone's present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering. There's supposed to be a last photograph of him on the only record album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock group—seven musicians posed, in the arrogant style of the early Stones, near an old rocket-bomb site, out in the East End, or South of the River. It is spring, and French thyme blossoms in amazing white lacework across the cape of green that now hides and softens the true shape of the old rubble. There is no way to tell which of the faces is Slothrop's: the only printed credit that might apply to him is "Harmonica, kazoo—a friend." But knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea. . . .)

While we took the children off to Disneyland. A visit to this magical kingdom should be a compulsory part of being an American---who else on earth would put so much ingenuity into simply having fun? The rides were fabulous: a real life pirate ship with real life pirates; a roller coaster that tppk you inside the Matterhorn (that was my favourite); and the Haunted House, with its flickering lights and a moving floor. By the end of the day, our feet were aching and our voices were hoarse, but it was well worth it. We all had a tremendous time !

I’ve found that there’s no real comfort in success. There’s never time to slow down, sit back, and relax. But there did come a moment later in my career when I knew that I had truly made it as a comedian. After I presented Richard Pryor with the lifetime achievement award at the American Comedy Awards, we were backstage posing for pictures. He looked up at me and said, “I stole your album.” For a split second, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The great Richard Pryor stealing my material? I was honored and stunned at the same time. “In Peoria, I went into the record store and I put it under my jacket and I walked out,” he continued. “Richard, I get a quarter royalty on every album.” With that, Richard Pryor pulled out a quarter and handed it to me. To have your album stolen by Richard Pryor is quite an achievement.

Irwin Silber, the editor of the folk magazine Sing Out! was there, too. In a few years’ time he would castigate me publicly in his magazine for turning my back on the folk community. It was an angry letter. I liked Irwin, but I couldn’t relate to it. Miles Davis would be accused of something similar when he made the album Bitches Brew, a piece of music that didn’t follow the rules of modern jazz, which had been on the verge of breaking into the popular marketplace, until Miles’s record came along and killed its chances. Miles was put down by the jazz community. I couldn’t imagine Miles being too upset.

There was a Ringo album coming down the pike, and a reunion, at least by the three of them (Harrison, Lennon, and Starr), that was all planned out. That was going to be Lennon’s next move after the world tour,” Douglas continues. “He talked fondly about McCartney every night, and he always wanted to redo certain Beatles songs, but he really spoke more like he really loved those guys. The only person that he was pissed at was George, because George put out this memoir [I Me Mine] and John was really, really pissed about that. I remember him saying, ‘How do you write about your life and not talk about the guy whose band you were in?

This book contains a story and several other things. The other things might be connected with the story, or they might not; they might be connected to stories that haven't appeared yet. It's not easy to tell. It's easy to imagine how they might have turned up, though. The world is full of things like that: old postcards, theater programs, leaflets about bomb-proofing your cellar, greeting cards, photograph albums, holiday brochures, instruction booklets for machine tools, maps, catalogs, railway timetables, menu cards from long-gone cruise liners-all kinds of things that once served a real and useful purpose, but have now become cut adrift from the things and the people they relate to. They might have come from anywhere. They might have come from other worlds. That scribbled-on map, that publisher's catalog-they might have been put down absentmindedly in another universe, and been blown by a chance wind through an open window, to find themselves after many adventures on a market stall in our world.

9. Your Photo Album Many people have a photo album. In it they keep memories of the happiest of times. There may be a photo of them playing by the beach when they were very young. There may be the picture with their proud parents at their graduation ceremony. There will be many shots of their wedding that captures their love at one of its highest points. And there will be holiday snapshots too. But you will never find in your album any photographs of miserable moments of your life. Absent is the photo of you outside the principal’s office at school. Missing is any photo of you studying hard late into the night for your exams. No one that I know has a picture of their divorce in their album, nor one of them in a hospital bed terribly sick, nor stuck in busy traffic on the way to work on a Monday morning! Such depressing shots never find their way into anyone’s photo album. Yet there is another photo album that we keep in our heads called our memory. In that album, we include so many negative photographs. There you find so many snapshots of insulting arguments, many pictures of the times when you were so badly let down, and several montages of the occasions where you were treated cruelly. There are surprisingly few photos in that album of happy moments. This is crazy! So let’s do a purge of the photo album in our head. Delete the uninspiring memories. Trash them. They do not belong in this album. In their place, put the same sort of memories that you have in a real photo album. Paste in the happiness of when you made up with your partner, when there was that unexpected moment of real kindness, or whenever the clouds parted and the sun shone with extraordinary beauty. Keep those photos in your memory. Then when you have a few spare moments, you will find yourself turning its pages with a smile, or even with laughter.

One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.

They wash the windows, the roof, the door, all of it. Then a crane drags the house from its spot and puts it down into the pit. There's dolls and books and cans all scattered around. The excavator picks them up. Then it covers everything with sand and clay, leveling it. And then instead of a village, you have an empty field. They sowed our land with corn. Our house is lying there, and our school and our village council office. My plants are there and two albums of stamps, I was hoping to bring them with me. Also I had a bike.

Have you always felt unseen, ignored, or unloved? Congratulations! You're the perfect prey for narcissists who feed off of blind worship and internal sadness. You'll never convince the target of your obsession that your love is what Sade was singing about on that one album. But oh, you will try. And in doing so, you will damage your self esteem. And then, once you wake up from the stupid spell you put on yourself, you can rail against those narcissists, but it won't affect them. So it's better just to skip ahead to the part where you admit that you're the one who bought the ticket to their show. Choose to want to figure out why you do these things and how to stop. In the end, it's all you can do.

When we were recording the Ozzmosis album we did a batch of it in New York. There was this occult bookstore...and they had everything in there on Wicca, Catholicism, Satanism, the whole nine yards. I was getting some Aleister Crowley stuff because Jimmy Page owned the castle (Crowley's former home) and the other guys were into him. ...I go to get his poster they had in there, I go "How much for this poster?" and the guy looks at me deadpan and goes "$6.66." I put seven bucks down and say "Keep the goddamn change. I can't take it, dude." So I hang the poster up and the boss man (Ozzy) walks in and he goes "Zakk, who's the guy upon the wall?" . I'm crying laughing and he goes "Zakk, who the fuck is he?!" I said "Ozz, you don't know who that is?" He goes "I don't fucking know, who is it?!" I said "Ozz! It's Aleister Crowley, bro!" He goes "Oh is that what that bald-headed cunt looks like?

This book contains a story and several other things. The other things might be connected with the story, or they might not; they might be connected to stories that haven't appeared yet. It's not easy to tell. It's easy to imagine how they might have turned up, though. The world is full of things like that: old postcards, theater programs, leaflets about bomb-proofing your cellar, greeting cards, photograph albums, holiday brochures, instruction booklets for machine tools, maps, catalogs, railway timetables, menu cards from long-gone cruise liners-all kinds of things that once served a real and useful purpose, but have now become cut adrift from the things and the people they relate to. They might have come from anywhere. They might have come from other worlds. That scribbled-on map, that publisher's catalog-they might have been put down absentmindedly in another universe, and been blown by a chance wind through an open window, to find themselves after many adventures on a market stall in our world.

He pulled a battered red photo album from his truck’s glove compartment and showed me pictures of green Azorean fields divided by hedges of lilac-colored hydrangeas. He showed me waves crashing against black volcanic rock and his ancient stone house next to the sea, the home where he returned every summer. “Over there the air is so clean, so nice. The ocean is right there. The fish are fresh, you catch and eat them, and the potatoes are so good, you won’t believe it. “We make wine. Put on shorts and get in there and smash grapes, and when you drink right away is sweet like juice. Every year when we get back from there, we’re fat,” Morais said. He loved his island house in the Azores so much that at the end of each summer, when he left, he had to have someone else close the door for him. “I’m a guy that came from the old country. I never go to school five minutes in this country, and still I work and I do good. I love my money. God bless this country,” he said. “But when I leave to close my door over there, I cry like a baby. I try so hard not to, but I cry.

In his earliest memories he was sitting on the floor in the family room, in front of the giant stereo his parents had bought themselves as a wedding present, his face pressed into the padded fabric of one speaker. The fabric was prickly against his forehead but his nose fit perfectly into a little groove, and he could feel music spilling like molten gold through his entire body. He'd sit back on his heels when the song was over and his father, an accountant and amateur drummer whose (still-unrealized) dream was to open a jazz club and coffee house, would say, "Order up!" and put another record on the turntable. Rabbit's favorite albums were by Earth, Wind & Fire (syncopation made his brain feel like it was laughing) and Also sprach Zarathustra, its opening rumbling like an earthquake. And he loved The White Album, and when his mother played ABBA on the piano and they'd sing together (though Alice couldn't do it without being a total showoff), and the Star Wars soundtrack, and of _course_ Zeppelin. For six months in 1984, he had asked his parents to play "Stairway to Heaven" instead of a bedtime story.

In a dream I sometimes have, I am frantically trying to save as much as I can from my childhood home before I am forced to leave forever because of some disaster. In this dream, from which I awake with my jaw clenched like a fist, I grab whatever I can reach, take whatever I can carry. Always my childhood books and our family photo albums, but sometimes also the silver candlesticks, the things on my father's desk, the paintings on the walls. Maybe it comes from the speed with which my family changed shape one day, maybe it comes from moving, maybe it comes from my grandmother's hinted horror of losing everything in the Holocaust, but I cannot part with a dented pot that I remember my mother putting on the stove each week. Or the sofa my father bought with his first pay cheque, which was never comfortable when I was growing up and is not comfortable now. I cannot part with the lipstick I found softly rolling in an empty drawer months after my mother left. Or a shopping list on an envelope in her handwriting. In a world that changes so quickly, and where everyone eventually leaves, our stuff is the one thing we can trust. It testifies, through the mute medium of Things, that we were part of something greater than ourselves.

What if I took the picture books that my grandmother made and snapped open the rings in every binder, let the plastic pages spill out onto the floor, and then attacked them with my scissors? Those books, pasted together by my grandmother, year after year, replaced the cognitive exercise of memory for me. Sitting on a section of wall-to-wall carpeting, drinking the bubbling red birch beer from a tinted brown glass, I reestablished my relationships with the members of my family. This is where I put it all together and perpetuated the lies. Not malicious lies, but lies with so many years to develop that we forgot the truth because nobody rehearsed it. When Mark was sentence to sixty days in a twelve-step rehab program in 1991, he wrote an inventory of his experiences with drugs and alcohol that filled a whole notebook, and then he gave it to us to read, It was in those pages that I learned he had once tapped the powder out of horse tranquilizer capsules, melted it down, and shot it into his veins for a high that lasted fourteen days. My God, I thought, Oh my God. This is Mark's story? Okay, now put the cooked-down shot-up horse tranquilizer against the pictures in the album. What do you get? Collage. Dry made wet and introduced into the body. Cut cut cut. It's not so radical.

It must be a shock to see us so old,” Hannah said. “I’m afraid I couldn’t climb a tree or shoot a marble if my life depended on it. Neither could Andrew, but I doubt he’ll admit it.” “If I put my mind to it,” Andrew said, “I could beat Drew with one hand tied behind my back. He was never any match for me.” Hannah raised her eyebrows. “It seems to me he outplayed you once.” “Pshaw. What’s one game?” If Aunt Blythe hadn’t come back just then, I’d have argued, maybe even challenged Andrew to a rematch, but instead, I smiled and leaned my head against Hannah’s shoulder, happy to feel her arm around me. This close, she still smelled like rose water. Turning the pages of the album, Hannah showed us pictures of Mama and Papa, Theo, herself--and Andrew. “These are my favorites.” She pointed to the photographs John had taken of us in the Model T. We were all smiling except Theo. He sat beside me, scowling into the camera, still angry about Mrs. Armiger and the music lessons. “We wanted Theo to come with us today,” Hannah said, “but he’s living down in Florida with his third wife--a lady half his age, I might add.” Andrew nudged me. “He sends his best, said he hopes to see you again someday.” I glanced at Aunt Blythe but she was staring at the photograph. “The resemblance is incredible. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was Drew.” Andrew chuckled. “Take a good look at me now. This is how the poor boy will look when he’s ninety-six.” I studied his rosy face, his white hair and mustache. His back was bent, but his eyes sparkled with mischief. Going to his side, I put my arms around him. “You’re not so bad,” I said. Dropping my voice to a whisper, I added, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you could still beat me in a game of ringer.

You didn’t marry?” Aunt Blythe asked Andrew. He glanced at me. “When I was a boy no older than Drew, I had a close brush with death. It always seemed to me a miracle that I lived.” Once more Hannah made an attempt to stop her brother with a poke of her cane, but Andrew went on talking, his eyes on my face, his voice solemn. “I often thought I’d been meant to die, so I decided to lead a solitary life. There’s no way of telling what one person might do to change the history of the world.” Before he could say anything else, Hannah patted Aunt Blythe’s arm. “I brought along an old photo album. Would you please fetch it from the car?” As soon as my aunt was out of sight, Hannah said, “If you don’t hush, Andrew, we’re going to leave the minute Blythe comes back. I swear I don’t know what ails you. You might as well be twelve years old!” She turned to me then and took my hand. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Drew? He was an absolute imp when he was your age and he still is. All that’s changed is his outside.” I stared into Hannah’s eyes, faded now to the color of shadows on winter snow. “He told you, didn’t he?” “In some ways, I think I knew all along.” Hannah squeezed my hand. “I’m so glad we’ve lived long enough to see you again.” I flung my arms around her. She felt as thin-boned as a bird, and I was afraid to hug her too tightly. I didn’t want to hurt her. “It must be a shock to see us so old,” Hannah said. “I’m afraid I couldn’t climb a tree or shoot a marble if my life depended on it. Neither could Andrew, but I doubt he’ll admit it.” “If I put my mind to it,” Andrew said, “I could beat Drew with one hand tied behind my back. He was never any match for me.” Hannah raised her eyebrows. “It seems to me he outplayed you once.” “Pshaw. What’s one game?

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.

After all, doesn’t part of philately’s attraction lie in the grip it holds on us? It is our eagerness to locate and acquire and add to our albums that testifies to our commitment to the hobby. If we weren’t obsessed with stamps, we’d limit our engagement with them to the mailing of an occasional letter, and find other uses for our time and money. We praise a book by stating that we couldn’t put it down. So what sort of endorsement is it to say of our stamp albums that we can put them down whenever we wish, and indeed stay away from them for days or weeks on end? I would contend that it’s a great virtue. And I’d bolster the argument by pointing to some other activities that can’t be so easily neglected.

Chris made the new album sound all the more enticing when he revealed to VH1 some of the personal events that had surrounded its writing (virtually all of which the band kept a closely guarded secret): “[It’s] born from all the places we’ve been and the things we’ve experienced. Some of our friends have died and some of us have fallen in love. Some of us have fallen out of love and some of us have been to Haiti and some us have been to Australia. Some of us have met Bono and some of us have met someone with nothing. It’s like a massive culture gun fired at our heads. All this stuff has been happening to us, and now we have the opportunity to put it into some songs.

Justin listens to Max Richter’s From Sleep, a composed album with a shortened version on Spotify. “I put it on very quietly as I am starting my bedtime routine, so it usually ends 15 to 20 minutes after I’m asleep. Or I will use the Sonos sleep timer, if I’m at home.

The thing about being an artist today is you get to develop right in front of people's eyes before you even put out an album.

Helen, a junior high math teacher in Minnesota, spent most of the school week teaching a difficult “new math” lesson. She could tell her students were frustrated and restless by week’s end. They were becoming rowdy so she told them to put their books away. She then instructed the class to take out clean sheets of paper. She gave each of them this assignment: Write down every one of your classmates’ names on the left, and then, on the right, put down one thing you like about that student. The tense and rowdy mood subsided and the room quieted when the students went to work. Their moods lifted as they dug into the assignment. There was frequent laughter and giggling. They looked around the room, sharing quips about one another. Helen’s class was a much happier group when the bell signaled the end of the school day. She took their lists home over the weekend and spent both days off recording what was said about each student on separate sheets of paper so she could pass on all the nice things said about each person without giving away who said what. The next Monday she handed out the lists she’d made for each student. The room buzzed with excitement and laughter. “Wow. Thanks! This is the coolest!” “I didn’t think anyone even noticed me!” “Someone thinks I’m beautiful?” Helen had come up with the exercise just to settle down her class, but it ended up giving them a big boost. They grew closer as classmates and more confident as individuals. She could tell they all seemed more relaxed and joyful. About ten years later, Helen learned that one of her favorite students in that class, a charming boy named Mark, had been killed while serving in Vietnam. She received an invitation to the funeral from Mark’s parents, who included a note saying they wanted to be sure she came to their farmhouse after the services to speak with them. Helen arrived and the grieving parents took her aside. The father showed her Mark’s billfold and then from it he removed two worn pieces of lined paper that had been taped, folded, and refolded many times over the years. Helen recognized her handwriting on the paper and tears came to her eyes. Mark’s parents said he’d always carried the list of nice things written by his classmates. “Thank you so much for doing that,” his mother said. “He treasured it, as you can see.” Still teary-eyed, Helen walked into the kitchen where many of Mark’s former junior high classmates were assembled. They saw that Mark’s parents had his list from that class. One by one, they either produced their own copies from wallets and purses or they confessed to keeping theirs in an album, drawer, diary, or file at home.

Helen, a junior high math teacher in Minnesota, spent most of the school week teaching a difficult “new math” lesson. She could tell her students were frustrated and restless by week’s end. They were becoming rowdy so she told them to put their books away. She then instructed the class to take out clean sheets of paper. She gave each of them this assignment: Write down every one of your classmates’ names on the left, and then, on the right, put down one thing you like about that student. The tense and rowdy mood subsided and the room quieted when the students went to work. Their moods lifted as they dug into the assignment. There was frequent laughter and giggling. They looked around the room, sharing quips about one another. Helen’s class was a much happier group when the bell signaled the end of the school day. She took their lists home over the weekend and spent both days off recording what was said about each student on separate sheets of paper so she could pass on all the nice things said about each person without giving away who said what. The next Monday she handed out the lists she’d made for each student. The room buzzed with excitement and laughter. “Wow. Thanks! This is the coolest!” “I didn’t think anyone even noticed me!” “Someone thinks I’m beautiful?” Helen had come up with the exercise just to settle down her class, but it ended up giving them a big boost. They grew closer as classmates and more confident as individuals. She could tell they all seemed more relaxed and joyful. About ten years later, Helen learned that one of her favorite students in that class, a charming boy named Mark, had been killed while serving in Vietnam. She received an invitation to the funeral from Mark’s parents, who included a note saying they wanted to be sure she came to their farmhouse after the services to speak with them. Helen arrived and the grieving parents took her aside. The father showed her Mark’s billfold and then from it he removed two worn pieces of lined paper that had been taped, folded, and refolded many times over the years. Helen recognized her handwriting on the paper and tears came to her eyes. Mark’s parents said he’d always carried the list of nice things written by his classmates. “Thank you so much for doing that,” his mother said. “He treasured it, as you can see.” Still teary-eyed, Helen walked into the kitchen where many of Mark’s former junior high classmates were assembled. They saw that Mark’s parents had his list from that class. One by one, they either produced their own copies from wallets and purses or they confessed to keeping theirs in an album, drawer, diary, or file at home. Helen the teacher was a “people builder.” She instinctively found ways to build up her students. Being a people builder means you consistently find ways to invest in and bring out the best in others. You give without asking for anything in return. You offer advice, speak faith into them, build their confidence, and challenge them to go higher. I’ve found that all most people need is a boost. All they need is a little push, a little encouragement, to become what God has created them to be. The fact is, none of us will reach our highest potential by ourselves. We need one another. You can be the one to tip the scales for someone else. You can be the one to stir up their seeds of greatness.

I don’t have an MO on my album. I literally just put down what I’m feeling at the time, and if it all comes together as ‘Fuck the alt-right,’ or ‘Word on the street you’re a Libtard,’ that’s cool. These are issues that I’m feeling and talking about now. But I was also talking about them when no one was looking, no one cared, no one was reviewing my songs. I’ve been talking about this shit since my first album, when I was 18. This is just what I care about and how I operate. So, if people want to put that on me, I don’t mind. But I don’t feel like I have a responsibility or owe anyone anything. If people see me as some flag bearer for ‘Fuck the alt-right,’ that’s fine, but people need to accept that I’m just being myself—I’m not trying to get likes or go viral. I’m just saying what I mean. I just hope that I don’t get pigeonholed like, ‘We want you to do this and nothing else.

Many of the first generation of Psychobillies were often ignorant about the history of Rockabilly and gained their love of Rock’n’Roll not from lovingly collecting twenty-five year old 45’s tracked down in dusty American record stores but by watching ‘Grease’ and ‘Happy Days’ alongside seeing Matchbox and The Stray Cats on ‘Top Of The Pops’. This was a generation weaned on ‘The Wanderers’, ‘Lemon Popsicle’ and stacks of low-rent TV advertised Rock’n’Roll albums.... They may not have known who [1950s rockabilly-country singer] Narvel Felts and [1950s rockabilly artist] ‘Groovey’ Joe Poovey were but they sure as hell had heard of Darts and Showaddywaddy and they undoubtedly knew “who put the bomp in the bompshoobompshoobomp” never mind the fucking ramalamadingdong.

Buckingham and Nicks put out their lone solo album (Buckingham/Nicks, on Polydor) in the early ’70s—and became stars in Birmingham, Alabama, of all places, as a result of the record’s regional popularity. The album’s producer, Keith Olsen, used tapes he made with the duo to pitch his own talents to Mick Fleetwood, and the drummer was impressed with both Olsen and Buckingham/Nicks.

What did you contribute to the next Fleetwood Mac album? I have three songs as it stands now, but I think we may replace one of them with another song. I wrote one of the songs a long, long time ago, even before Lindsey and I moved to LA. It’s called “It’s Alright.” It’s very simple; Lindsey just plays some really nice guitar behind me. There’s another song called “If You Were My Love” that I wrote about a year ago after I’d recorded “Outside the Rain” with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. I spent a week recording with them and I had so much fun that I was really bummed out when it was over. That’s when I wrote that song. There was also a song called “Smile at You” that I don’t think we’ll put on. I think Lindsey wants me to record another one and so do I. It’s kind of a bitter song and that’s really not where any of us are at right now, even though it’s a wonderful song. My songs don’t take long to record, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

I was the pitchman. I went to each of the houses, sat on a lot of couches, and flipped through dozens of family photo albums as I explained to the homeowners that we were going to build student housing and they could either stay and put up with loud music at night and beer cans on the lawn, or they could move to the other side of Ann Arbor. It worked. I kept buying houses and eventually acquired one full block of land. They were all cash deals, $1,000 each to tie up the properties with deferred closings requiring around $20,000.

I put on the Cranberries' Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?—a perfect album from the first song to the last— pressed play, shut off the lights, lay down, and closed my eyes, expecting never to open them again.

John was putting out his first solo album, an extraordinary revelation about himself. No one at the time made an album that intimate.

In his own way Harmonica Frank was as much a maniac as Little Richard. He sounded like a drunken clown who’s seen it all, remembers about half of that, and makes the rest up. He put together a style of country rock that did not really find an audience until years later, when Bob Dylan caught the same spirit and much of the sound with “Mixed-Up Confusion,” his first single, a lot of the Freewbeelin’ album, and his “I Shall Be Free” songs.

In the last decade and a half a revival of plant behavior research had brought countless new realizations to botany, more than forty years after an irresponsible best-selling book nearly snuffed out the field for good. The Secret Life of Plants, published in 1973, captured the public imagination on a global scale. Written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, the book was a mix of real science, flimsy experiments, and unscientific projection. In one chapter, Tompkins and Bird suggested that plants could feel and hear—and that they preferred Beethoven to rock and roll. In another, a former CIA agent named Cleve Backster hooked up a polygraph test to his houseplant and imagined the plant being set on fire. The polygraph needle went wild, which would mean the plant was experiencing a surge in electrical activity. In humans, a reading like that was believed to denote a surge of stress. The plant, according to Backster, was responding to his malevolent thoughts. The implication was that there existed not only a sort of plant consciousness but also plant mind-reading. The book was an immediate and meteoric success on the popular market, surprising for a book about plant science. Paramount put out a feature film about it. Stevie Wonder wrote the soundtrack. The first pressings of the album version were sent out scented with floral perfume. To its many astonished readers, the book offered a new way to view the plants all around them, which up until then had seemed ornamental, passive, more akin to the world of rocks than animals. It also aligned with the advent of New Age culture, which was ready to inhale stories about how plants were as alive as we are. People began talking to their houseplants, and leaving classical music playing for their ficus when they went out. But it was a beautiful collection of myths.

Listen, there are many things I would love for the holidays: the ability to put muscle on this scraggly body, a pay raise for every teacher in the country, Rihanna to release a new album. Finding a boyfriend isn’t high on my priorities.

Baby Cooper and Aaron running around causing trouble,” Dad said, setting an album on Lark’s lap. “Aaron was a very good baby. Didn’t cry at all. Not once.” When I laughed, Dad gave me a wink. “Here was our boy at three months.” Lark looked at the picture and laughed. Knowing exactly what she thought was so funny, I explained, “They thought they were adopting a girl, so I wore pink those first few months.” “Babies grow so fast at that age,” Mom said. “No reason to waste money on new clothes when he wouldn’t know the difference.” Lark laughed at this comment and kept laughing until the pictures reached when I was three. Her eyes moistened and again I was the one to explain. “Lark’s little brother died around that age.” As Mom and Dad descended on her with hugs, I never saw my girl look so startled. Life was different for her now. No longer was she struggling to survive in a dysfunctional family of revolving fathers and a cold mother. Now, she was a Barnes and we were fully functional and only slightly on the weird side. “You have curls,” she cooed, running her finger over a picture of me at five. “I loved those curls,” Mom said. “She put barrettes in those curls,” I muttered, standing behind the three of them as they looked through the album. Ignoring my parents’ laughter, I continued, “I begged to have my hair shaved short. Once it was, I never looked back.

Photos Cherish who you are now If you have been sorting and discarding things in the order I recommend, you have likely stumbled across photographs in many different places, perhaps stuck between books on a shelf, lying in a desk drawer, or hidden in a box of odds and ends. While many may already have been in albums, I’m sure you found the odd photo or two enclosed with a letter or still encased in the envelope from the photo shop. (I don’t know why so many people leave photos in these envelopes.) Because photos tend to emerge from the most unexpected places when we are sorting other categories, it is much more efficient to put them in a designated spot every time you find one and deal with them all at the very end. There is a good reason to leave photos for last. If you start sorting photos before you have honed your intuitive sense of what brings you joy, the whole process will spin out of control and come to a halt. In contrast, once you have followed the correct order for tidying (i.e., clothes, books, papers, komono, sentimental items), sorting will proceed smoothly, and you will be amazed by your capacity to choose on the basis of what gives you pleasure. There is only one way to sort photos, and you should keep in mind that it takes a little time. The correct method is to remove all your photos from their albums and look at them one by one. Those who protest that this is far too much work are people who have never truly sorted photos. Photographs exist only to show a specific event or time. For this reason, they must be looked at one by one. When you do this, you will be surprised at how clearly you can tell the difference between those that touch your heart and those that don’t. As always, only keep the ones that inspire joy. With this method, you will keep only about five per day of a special trip, but this will be so representative of that time that they bring back the rest vividly. Really important things are not that great in number. Unexciting photos of scenery that you can’t even place belong in the garbage. The meaning of a photo lies in the excitement and joy you feel when taking it. In many cases, the prints developed afterward have already outlived their purpose. Sometimes people keep a mass of photos in a big box with the intention of enjoying them someday in their old age. I can tell you now that “someday” never comes. I can’t count how many boxes of unsorted photographs I have seen that were left by someone who has passed away. A typical conversation with my clients goes something like this: “What’s in that box?” “Photos.” “Then you can leave them to sort at the end.” “Oh, but they aren’t mine. They belonged to my grandfather.” Every time I have this conversation it makes me sad. I can’t help thinking that the lives of the deceased would have been that much richer if the space occupied by that box had been free when the person was alive. Besides, we shouldn’t still be sorting photos when we reach old age. If you, too, are leaving this task for when you grow old, don’t wait. Do it now. You will enjoy the photos far more when you are old if they are already in an album than if you have to move and sort through a heavy boxful of them.

To all the lovely ladies and the equally lovely men, Put on that favourite album from your youth, march to the kitchen henceforth, open the drawer – you know the one – with the wooden spoon inside it! Pull out that spoon-cum-microphone, turn up the music and sing your heart out. Use nothing less than the power of the top of your voice. Now, be thankful. You’re a legend in your own lifetime. And there will never be another you.

KAREN’S DISASTER of a marriage only served to exacerbate her mental illness and physical descent. “You expect a marriage to go through its ups and downs,” says Phil Ramone. “Unfortunately hers read exactly like the solo album, but it was her life. Its failure was exactly the same. That’s too much for any human being to take. Any way you look at it, that disaster was the final nail.” According to Itchie, “Karen tried to put a smile on her face all the time. No one wants to own up to having been deceived, especially with her life in the spotlight. Her wedding had been the centerfold of People. In truth, her marriage didn’t really last more than about three months.

By Lawrence Van Alstyne December 24, 1863 As tomorrow is Christmas we went out and made such purchases of good things as our purses would allow, and these we turned over to George and Henry for safe keeping and for cooking on the morrow. After that we went across the street to see what was in a tent that had lately been put up there. We found it a sort of show. There was a big snake in a showcase filled with cheap looking jewelry, each piece having a number attached to it. Also, a dice cup and dice. For $1.00 one could throw once, and any number of spots that came up would entitle the thrower to the piece of jewelry with a corresponding number on it. Just as it had all been explained to us, a greenhorn-looking chap came in and, after the thing had been explained to him, said he was always unlucky with dice, but if one of us would throw for him he would risk a dollar just to see how the game worked. Gorton is such an accommodating fellow I expected he would offer to make the throw for him, but as he said nothing, I took the cup and threw seventeen. The proprietor said it was a very lucky number, and he would give the winner $12 in cash or the fine pin that had the seventeen on it. The fellow took the cash, like a sensible man. I thought there was a chance to make my fortune and was going right in to break the bank, when Gorton, who was wiser than I, took me to one side and told me not to be a fool; that the greenhorn was one of the gang, and that the money I won for him was already his own. Others had come by this time and I soon saw he was right, and I kept out. We watched the game a while, and then went back to Camp Dudley and to bed. Christmas, and I forgot to hang up my stocking. After getting something to eat, we took stock of our eatables and of our pocket books, and found we could afford a few things we lacked. Gorton said he would invite his horse jockey friend, James Buchanan, not the ex-President, but a little bit of a man who rode the races for a living. So taking Tony with me I went up to a nearby market and bought some oysters and some steak. This with what we had on hand made us a feast such as we had often wished for in vain. Buchanan came, with his saddle in his coat pocket, for he was due at the track in the afternoon. George and Henry outdid themselves in cooking, and we certainly had a feast. There was not much style about it, but it was satisfying. We had overestimated our capacity, and had enough left for the cooks and drummer boys. Buchanan went to the races, Gorton and I went to sleep, and so passed my second Christmas in Dixie. At night the regiment came back, hungry as wolves. The officers mostly went out for a supper, but Gorton and I had little use for supper. We had just begun to feel comfortable. The regiment had no adventures and saw no enemy. They stopped at Baton Rouge and gave the 128th a surprise. Found them well and hearty, and had a real good visit. I was dreadfully sorry I had missed that treat. I would rather have missed my Christmas dinner. They report that Colonel Smith and Adjutant Wilkinson have resigned to go into the cotton and sugar speculation. The 128th is having a free and easy time, and according to what I am told, discipline is rather slack. But the stuff is in them, and if called on every man will be found ready for duty. The loose discipline comes of having nothing to do. I don’t blame them for having their fun while they can, for there is no telling when they will have the other thing. From Diary of an Enlisted Man by Lawrence Van Alstyne. New Haven, Conn., 1910.

I put the photo in an album called Mortifying Emotional Moments, and I title it Soggy Napkin Note. The last selfie I posted in there was of me on the day I graduated college. My perfectly made up face is happy ... relieved. I called that one: Sallie Mae Can Suck It.

Soon, we won't have any of those objects anymore- no books, no photo albums, no records, tapes, even CDs- which were pretty soul-less and awful- but now I feel nostalgic even about them. There'll be nothing to hold on to, put on a shelf. Nothing that lives with you in the world.

I stood and filled a pot with water to boil. I’d had red beans with andouille sausage simmering in a Crock-Pot all day. I added rice to the water when it boiled, then I started to chop green peppers and onions. My chopping was quick but masterly. I placed a baguette from the Flour Bakery in the oven. I opened a second bottle of Abita, interspersing sips of beer with a glass of water. I pulled out some plates and opened a bottle of sauvignon blanc for Susan. I put an old Louis Jordan album on the turntable. “While you slave over the stove, I’ll freshen up,” she said. “A truly modern relationship.” “Would you rather me cook?” “We each have our talents.

Eno again: “I know he liked Another Green World a lot, and he must have realised that there were these two parallel streams of working going on in what I was doing, and when you find someone with the same problems you tend to become friendly with them.” Another Green World (1975) has a different feel to Low, but it deploys some of the same strategies. It mixes songs that have recognisable pop structures with other, short, abstract pieces that Eno called “ambient”—with the emphasis not on melody or beat, but on atmosphere and texture. These intensely beautiful fragments fade in then out, as if they were merely the visible part of a vast submarine creation; they are like tiny glimpses into another world. On the more conventional tracks, different genres juxtapose, sometimes smoothly, sometimes not—jazzy sounds cohering with pop hooks but struggling against intrusive synthetic sound effects. The end result is a moodily enigmatic album of real power and ingenuity. One structural difference between the two albums, though, is that while Eno interspersed the “textural” pieces across Another Green World, Bowie separated them out and put them on another side, which provides Low with a sort of metanarrative.

electrical cords, dangerous cleaning supplies, household chemicals, sugar free gum with xylitol (which can be fatal to dogs) and potentially toxic plants, like lilies and philodendrons. Put irreplaceable items, such as photo albums or a toy that a child uses as a security blanket out of reach.

But maybe every life looked wonderful if all you saw was the photo albums. People always obediently smiled and tilted their heads when a camera was put in front of them. Perhaps seconds after the shutter clicked [they] sprang apart, avoiding each others’ eyes, their smiles replaced by snarls.

I remember when I bought Dear Rose,. I was sixteen and ran upstairs and closed the door and listened to it on repeat for hours. It was the first album I listened to in my car when I got my license—I loved it—and everything ever since. Your music is sort of my soundtrack.” He puts down his knife and fork as our eyes lock. “Thank you.” The words hang in the air and the tension mounts. Awe that I’m sitting here with him washes over me in waves as I realize I’ve admitted too much. Afraid I sound like a stalker superfan, I close my eyes, breaking the connection. When I reopen them, he’s still staring at me.

Babe, this one’s different. Open it,” Kenna instructed softly. When Ripley did, Kenna knew she’d made the right decision. Ripley’s face lit up before she immediately burst into tears. “I did some research. I found a few of your parents’ friends and asked them to scour their own photo albums, emails, files, and anywhere else they might have stowed pictures away. I had copies made and put them all in here for you.

With the last window firmly shut, she switched on the air-con and put on her favourite album – Keane’s Hopes and Fears. The album was released back in 2004, but she had only discovered the British band last year. It was love at first listen. Since then, she put it on almost every day. The languid and dreamy voice filled the air as a new day at Hyunam-dong Bookshop began.

They came back to the studio with him and gave us a song that was on their next album but wasn’t coming out as a single, “I Wanna Be Your Man.” They played it through with us. Brian put on some nice slide guitar; we turned it into an unmistakably Stones rather than Beatles song. It was clear that we had a hit almost before they’d left the studio. They deliberately aimed it at us. They’re songwriters, they’re trying to flog their songs, it’s Tin Pan Alley, and they thought this song would suit us. And also we were a mutual-admiration society. Mick and I admired their harmonies and their songwriting capabilities; they envied us our freedom of movement and our image. And they wanted to join in with us. The thing is, with the Beatles and us, it was a very friendly relationship. It was also very cannily worked out, because in those days singles were coming out every six, eight weeks. And we’d try and time it so that we didn’t clash. I remember John Lennon calling me up and saying, “Well, we’ve not finished mixing yet.” “We’ve got one ready to go.” “OK, you go first.

On 22 November, the day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Parlophone released the band’s second album, With the Beatles. Advance orders of half a million put it instantly at the top of the UK album charts, so finally ending the seven-month reign there of Please Please Me. It would eventually sell one million copies, more than any album previously released in Britain except the cast recording of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific.

I thought of my mother, and how some day, in the future, I would go with my sister to her apartment, the one I had never seen, with the single task of sorting through a lifetime of possessions, packing everything away. I thought of all the things I would find there—private things like jewelry, photo albums and letters, but also signs of a careful and well-organized life: bills and receipts, phone numbers, an address book, the manual for the washing machine and dryer. In the bathroom, there would be half-used glass vials and jars of creams, signs of her daily rituals that she did not like anyone else to see. My sister, I knew, ever methodical, would suggest we sort things into piles: things to keep, things to donate, things to put in the trash. I would agree but, in the end, I knew I would keep nothing, whether out of too much, or too little sentiment, I did not know.

The Blasters proved to be the most prominent and popular of these acts by far. Originally a quartet, the band was bred in Downey, just down the freeway from East L.A. In their teens, brothers Phil and Dave Alvin were bitten by the blues bug; they became habitués of the L.A. club the Ash Grove, where many of the best-known folk and electric blues performers played, and they sought out the local musicians who could teach them their craft, learning firsthand from such icons as Big Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, and Little Richard’s saxophonist Lee Allen (who would ultimately join the band in the ’80s). But the Blasters’ style was multidimensional: they could play R&B, they loved country music, and they were also dyed-in-the-wool rockabilly fans who were initially embraced by the music’s fervent L.A. cultists. Their debut album, 1980’s American Music, was recorded in a Van Nuys garage by the Milan, Italy–born rockabilly fanatic Rockin’ Ronnie Weiser, and released on his indie label Rollin’ Rock Records, which also issued LPs by such first-generation rockabilly elders as Gene Vincent, Mac Curtis, Jackie Waukeen Cochran, and Ray Campi. By virtue of Phil Alvin’s powerful, unmannered singing and Dave Alvin’s adept guitar playing and original songwriting, the Blasters swiftly rose to the top of a pack of greasy local bands that also included Levi and the Rockats (a unit fronted by English singer Levi Dexter) and the Rockabilly Rebels (who frequently backed Ray Campi). Los Lobos were early Blasters fans, and often listened to American Music in their van on the way to their own (still acoustic) gigs. Rosas says, “We loved their first record, man. We used to play the shit out of that record. Dave [Hidalgo] was the one who got a copy of it, and he put it on cassette.

It was a childhood dream of mine, to make music that made people feel loved, OK? And I have a thing for making people cry. So, I took on that kind of karma for a while … But I couldn’t get that out of my blood. It was a very loving album, and a source of embarrassment for me. My masculine side had to take a bow, like a little hiatus, to get Pet Sounds to happen. But I did it. I did it ’cos I needed to. They say, “What about these high feminine parts, Brian?” – Well, that’s how I felt, man. I wanted to be a girl in my voice, so I did. I wanted to sing like a girl. Not consciously, but it was all figured out in my brain, waiting for me to do it. So I went in there, put some beautiful music on tape … That “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” … That’s a lovely, lovely record.

I've had a heap o' comfort all my life makin' quilts, and now in my old age I wouldn't take a fortune for 'em. Set down here, child, where you can see out o' the winder and smell the lilacs, and we'll look at 'em all. You see, some folks has albums to put folks' pic tures in to remember :em by, and some folks has a book and writes down the things that happen every day so they won't forgit 'em; but, honey, these quilts is my albums and my di'ries, and whenever the weather's bad and I can't git out to see folks, I jest spread out my quilts and look at 'em and study over 'em, and it's jest like goin' back fifty or sixty years and livin' my life over agin. "There ain't nothin' like a piece o' caliker for bringin' back old times, child, unless it's a flower or a bunch o'thyme or a piece o' pennyroy'l — anything that smells sweet. Why, I can go out yonder in the yard and gether a bunch o' that purple lilac and jest shut my eyes and see faces I ain't seen for fifty years, and somethin' goes through me like a flash o' lightnin', and it seems like I'm young agin jest for that minute.

Once, while leaving a nightclub, a famous musician plucked twenty young girls off the dance floor and had them sit in a room next to his recording studio until five in the morning. He took their phones, made them sign NDAs, and put them all together, out of the way, to wait till he was done playing his new album for some friends. Then they would all party, he said. A guy I know was there, and as he was leaving, he saw the girls crowded together. He said the room looked like the DMV. I pictured the girls exhausted, with no internet or cameras or texts to distract themselves. A little drunk. I saw their push-up bras, their curls falling flat under the fluorescent lights. Why do you think they waited in that room, Steve? Maybe many years from now, maybe next week, those girls will suddenly feel upset at something and not know why. Where is this reaction coming from? They really won’t know, they won’t be able to place it, but it will be because of the way they let themselves sit in that room. The way they put on their makeup and dressed themselves up. They’ll feel small and blame no one but themselves. I so desperately craved men’s validation that I accepted it even when it came wrapped in disrespect. I was those girls in that room, waiting, trading my body and measuring my self-worth in a value system that revolves around men and their desire.

Neil Tennant: I liked anything that had a slightly artificial construct to it. I’ve never really been that interested by authentic music. I think authenticity is a style. But I loved Bowie when he went electric with Low and ‘Heroes’, and I really loved electronic music. Although I wasn’t officially gay at this point, I had gay friends who I would occasionally go to nightclubs with, and you would hear what we would think of as gay disco music. That was heavily electronic. I really loved electronic music, like Kraftwerk’s Man-Machine, and at the same time I loved new-wave music. I liked the pop end of it, the Jam and stuff like that. Then the Human League came along, and OMD’s first album was great. Then, of course, at the same time you had Giorgio Moroder, who wasn’t, lest we forget, cool at this point. In fact, he was quite naff. There was a designer who worked at Marvel Comics who would put on ‘I Feel Love’ because he could put it on, go to the toilet and come back, and it was still playing.

Go through old photo albums and rediscover the face of your younger self. Let that image burn into your brain because it will serve you well throughout the rest of your inner child work. You might even like to put photos of yourself next to your bedside table, in your wallet, or around the house just to remind yourself of your inner child’s presence.

Psychologists have studied how the brain chooses which memories to give flashbulb status, analogous to choosing which photos to put in a family album. It turns out that flashbulb memories are connected not only to the emotions attached to the remembered event but also to social psychological factors. Memories that involve a shared identity with others, or that are rehearsed with others, are more likely to achieve flashbulb status.14 Thus flashbulb memories are selected in a way that gives them a better chance to be involved in the formation of contagious narratives.

When I arrived in San Francisco, there was no way to find the Castro on any map. People were forever calling the bookstore for directions to the neighborhood. In my group there was the sense that we were a wave arriving on the West Coast from the East: postcollegiate youngsters seeking and finding a paradise of cheap apartments and thrift stores bursting with the old athletic T-shirts and jeans and flannel shirts we all prixed. I remember when I put the empty clothes together with the empty apartments, on an ordinary sunny afternoon walking down the sidewalk to work: there on a blanket stood a pari of black leather steel-toed boots, twelve-hole lace-ups. They gleamed, freshly polished, in the light of the morning. As I approached them, feeling the pull of the hill, I drew up short to examine the rest of the sidewalk sale. Some old albums, Queen and Sylvester; three pairs of jeans; two leather wristbands; a box of old T-shirts; a worn watch, the hands still moving; a pressed-leather belt, west style; and cowboy boots, the same size as the steel-toes. I tried the steel-toes on and took a long look at the salesman as I stood up, feelign that they were exactly my size. This man was thin, thin in a way that was immediately familiar. Hollowing from the inside out. His skin reddened, and his brown eyes looked over me as if lighting might fall on me out of that clear afternoon sky. And I knew then, as I paid twenty dollars for the boots, that they'd been recently emptied. That he was watching me walk off in the shoes of the newly dead. And that all of this had been happening for some time now.

She looked at me listlessly. “Kristen, why haven’t you talked to him?” The question surprised me. My best friend hadn’t been my best friend in a long time. We didn’t talk about me or what I was going through. We didn’t really talk about anything. I went back to scrolling through the artist’s album on her phone so I wouldn’t have to look at her. “What’s there to say?” She laughed. It actually startled me it was so sudden, and I stared at her in surprise. “Go home, Kristen.” I blinked at her. “What?” She took her phone from my hands. “Go home. Talk to him. Be with him. Be happy.” I furrowed my brow. “Nothing has changed, Sloan.” She stared at me with red-rimmed eyes. “You don’t think you’re worth it.” I shifted uncomfortably. “What are you talking about?” “Your mom. All your life she made you feel like you were never good enough. And so you don’t think you’re good enough for Josh either. But you are.” I shook my head. “No. That’s not it, Sloan.” “Yeah. It is.” “Sloan, he doesn’t know what’s best for him. He’s just thinking about right now.” “No. You’re the one who doesn’t know what’s best for you. She ruined you. She spent your whole childhood setting a bar she knew you’d never reach, and now you think you have to be perfect to be good enough for anyone.” We stared at each other. Then Sloan’s chest started to rise and fall in the rapid way that told me a breakdown was coming. I instinctively pulled tissues from a box on the end table just as her eyes started to tear up. “Kristen? Brandon’s accident is my fault.” I was used to this. She lost focus a lot. This time I was glad for the change of subject. “No, Sloan, it wasn’t.” I took the plate from her lap and put it on the coffee table and gathered up her hands. “None of this was your fault.” She bit her lip, the tears falling down her cheeks. “It is. I should have never let him ride that bike. I should have insisted.” I shook my head, scooting closer to her. “No. He was a grown man, Sloan. He was a paramedic. He went on those accident calls—he knew the risks. Don’t you dare put this on yourself.” Her chin quivered. “How can I not? Shouldn’t I have protected him from himself? I loved him. It was my job.

In 2009, we’d put on the first-ever White House poetry and spoken-word event, listening as a young composer named Lin-Manuel Miranda stood up and astonished everyone with a piece from a project he was just beginning to put together, describing it as a “concept album about the life of someone I think embodies hip-hop…Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton.” I remember shaking his hand and saying, “Hey, good luck with the Hamilton thing.

Garret played me Trent Reznor’s music video “Broken,” a series of cut-and-paste video clips of animal pornography and people shooting themselves. I didn’t understand it, though Garret tried to explain it to me—something about American culture being overwhelmed by commodification and the resulting depression we feel at being controlled by the hidden politics of a truly fascist state. Or something like that. I wanted to know how Garret found out what a particular song meant, or about Danzig and “She Sells Sanctuary” by the Cult, or when Skinny Puppy was putting out their next album, or who Bauhaus was.

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag.

Back in my room I put my earphones in. Put on A Tribe Called Red. They’re a group of First Nations DJs and producers based out of Ottawa. They make electronic music with samples from powwow drum groups. It’s the most modern, or most postmodern, form of Indigenous music I’ve heard that’s both traditional and new-sounding. The problem with Indigenous art in general is that it’s stuck in the past. The catch, or the double bind, about the whole thing is this: If it isn’t pulling from tradition, how is it Indigenous? And if it is stuck in tradition, in the past, how can it be relevant to other Indigenous people living now, how can it be modern? So to get close to but keep enough distance from tradition, in order to be recognizably Native and modern-sounding, is a small kind of miracle these three First Nations producers made happen on a particularly accessible self-titled album, which they, in the spirit of the age of the mixtape, gave away for free online.

Yet Bowie was just hitting his golden years, rushing out his five best albums from 1976 to 1980, the best five-album run of anyone in the seventies (or since): Station to Station, Low, “Heroes,” Lodger, and Scary Monsters. In this time span, he also made the two albums that brought back Iggy Pop from the dead—The Idiot, prized by Bowie freaks as a rare showcase for his eccentric lead guitar, and Lust for Life—and his finest live album, Stage, from the 1978 tour, absurdly turning the ambient instrumentals from Low and “Heroes” into arena rock. As he put it at the time, “I’m using myself as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time on it. The white face, the baggy pants—they’re Pierrot, the eternal clown putting across the great sadness of 1976.

If you want an average, successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1) Become the best at one specific thing. 2) Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try. The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it. I always advise young people to become good public speakers (top 25%). Anyone can do it with practice. If you add that talent to any other, suddenly you’re the boss of the people who have only one skill. Or get a degree in business on top of your engineering degree, law degree, medical degree, science degree, or whatever. Suddenly you’re in charge, or maybe you’re starting your own company using your combined knowledge. Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. . . . At least one of the skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal. And it could be as simple as learning how to sell more effectively than 75% of the world. That’s one. Now add to that whatever your passion is, and you have two, because that’s the thing you’ll easily put enough energy into to reach the top 25%. If you have an aptitude for a third skill, perhaps business or public speaking, develop that too. It sounds like generic advice, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any successful person who didn’t have about three skills in the top 25%.

Puri found the walls bare, his secretary having put away all his accolades, including his signed and personalized Kenny G album cover

I couldn’t wait to plug them in and listen to Sepultura’s Roots album on them, because they’re the size of the Glastonbury PA. So I put in a CD of Roots and I turned it up to 10—and that fucking record blew those speakers right out. Fifty-thousand-dollar speakers, gone because of Roots …

If you’re single and you want to get married, put an empty photo album on your table. That’s where you’re going to put your wedding photos. When you see it, you’re moving toward it.