Song Recording Quotes

So to you, or anyone else who has spent four minutes on me in some way-- listening to just one song, or watching one of my videos….Thank you. I love you like I love sparkles and having the last word. And that's real love.

What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song.

You make me smile like the sun, fall out bed, sing like a bird, dizzy in my head. Spin like a record crazy on a sunday night. You make me dance like a fool, forget how to breath, shine like the sun buzz like a bee, just the thought of you can drive me wild. Oh you make me smile. -Uncle Kracker-

I rode an elevator with a guy who was whistling the tune of 'this is the song that never ends'. Putting that on me? Come on dude..

A few years have gone and come around when we were sittin' at our favorite spot in town and you looked at me, got down on one knee. Take me back to the time when we walked down the aisle; the whole town came and our mammas cried. And you said "I do.", and I did, too. Take me home where we met so many years before; we'll rock our babies on the very front porch. After all this time, you and I. And I'll be eighty-seven you'll be eighty-nine, I'll still look at you like the stars that shine. In the sky. Oh, my my my.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it to feel sane.

But of bliss and glad life there is little to be said, before it ends; as works fair and wonderful, while they still endure for eyes to see, are ever their own record, and only when they are in peril or broken for ever do they pass into song.

These days, I've been trying to classify my thoughts into two categories: "Things I can change," and "Things I can't." It seems to help me sort through what to really stress about. But there I go again, over-planning and over-organizing my over-thinking! I write songs about my adventures and misadventures, most of which concern love. Love is a tricky business. But if it wasn't, I wouldn't be so enthralled with it. Lately I've come to a wonderful realization that makes me even more fascinated by it: I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to love. No one does! There's no pattern to it, except that it happens to all of us, of course. I can't plan for it. I can't predict how it'll end up. Because love is unpredictable and it's frustrating and it's tragic and it's beautiful. And even though there's no way to feel like I'm an expert at it, it's worth writing songs about -- more than anything else I've ever experienced in my life.

Lady gagas "hair" is my theme song.

I wrote the song 'Down to Earth' a few years ago, and i was really excited to record it for My World album. It's a huge fan favourite. So many people feel where i'm coming from. It doesn't need any spectacular stage effects in the touring show; the best thing i can do is just sing it straight from my heart. I'm not afraid to show my emotions; if you love someone, you should tell them. If you think a girl is beautiful, you should say that. Usher says some songs work best when there's a sob in the singer's voice. You gotta let that deep feeling come through. And that's how i felt about this song. Sometimes the emotion of it is enough to bring tears to my eyes.

Your old home town's so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playing, a song called 'Hold On

Having room to run and having just the space to use your imagination and create stories out of everyday life, I think that had a lot to do with me wanting write. And write songs

My dad is adorably optimistic, positive, pie-in-the-sky. He thinks every new song I write is my best. He sells T-shirts at my merchandise stands and hands out guitar picks to fans.

I watched their reactions and emotions, especially to understand what was what I was doing wrong. But then I realized that if I could see these people and take note of everything I saw, I could write a good song.

I put my hand on the altar rail. 'What if ... what if Heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you're dying of thirst, or when someone's nice to you for no reason, or ...' Mam's pancakes with Toblerone sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, 'Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite'; or Jacko and Sharon singing 'For She's A Squishy Marshmallow' instead of 'For She's A Jolly Good Fellow' every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it's not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. 'S'pose Heaven's not like a painting that's just hanging there for ever, but more like ... Like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you're alive, from passing cars, or ... upstairs windows when you're lost ...

I always thought I'd be really fun to sing a song with Miley.

There are videos where I would go approaching strangers and sing the songs from 'The Lion King. I would have been about four years, and I came running up to people on the beach, strangers that I chose at random and began to sing, and my family never knew where I was, they were always looking for me, trying to imagine who I was harassing this time .

That’s why all those records from high school sound so good. It’s not that the songs were better—it’s that we were listening to them with our friends, drunk for the first time on liqueurs, touching sweaty palms, staring for hours at a poster on the wall, not grossed out by carpet or dirt or crumpled, oily bedsheets. These songs and albums were the best ones because of how huge adolescence felt then, and how nostalgia recasts it now.

KAREN: That was a great song to record. I was really proud of it. Just Daisy singing and me on the keys. That’s it. Just two bitches playing rock ’n’ roll.

See, the thing is I didn't think that that song would get much attention because it's such a personal song to me. I just wrote it about my childhood, and I didn't know how that would read on an album. But it's been everybody's favorite song. I didn't tell my mom. It was a total secret. So I wrote it in secret and then decided to record it secretly, so she had no idea that the song was recorded. My producers sent me the track and I synched it up to all my baby videos and I played it for her one Christmas Eve, and she bawled her eyes out. She didn't even think that it was my song. She didn't think there was any way for me to record a song without her knowing.

There was one solo; but it was a guy. It was this character called 'Freddy Fast Talk' and it was the bad guy. I didn't care, I was like I will dress up like a guy, I want to sing that song. And so I remembered we drew on eyebrows, and I had like a moustache,and we put all my hair up in this hat. So I dressed like a guy and sang the solo.

Take the needle off the record that keeps playing the same song. A full range of potential is headed your way with new discoveries that are going to take you places you only dreamt of.

Well, I’ve been a musician my whole life. When I was two, I would sing the theme from Star Wars in my crib; my mom taped it for proof. Then, when I was five, I asked for a violin. No one knew why I would want one, but my wish was granted and I ended up a classically trained fiddler by age 12. The only problem with that was, when you’re a classical violinist, everybody expects you to be satisfied with playing Tchaikovsky for the rest of your life, and saying you want to play jazz, rock, write songs, sing your songs, hook up your fiddle to a guitar amp, sleep with your 4-track recorder, mess around with synths, dress like Tinkerbell in combat boots, AND play Tchaikovsky is equivalent to spitting on the Pope.

I wrote a song called 'Red' and thinking about what that song means to me and all the different emotions on this album they're all pretty much about the tumultuous, crazy, insane, intense, semi-toxic relationships I've experienced in the last two years. All those emotions fanning from intense love, intense frustration, intense jealousy, confusion, all of that in my mind, all those emotions are red. There's nothing in between, there's nothing beige about those feelings and so I called my record that.

Sam tapped her hand on the steering wheel. Patrick held his hand outside the car and made air waves. I just sat between them. After the song finished, I said something. 'I feel infinite.' And Sam and Patrick looked at me like I said the greatest thing they ever heard. Because the song was that great and because we all really paid attention to it. Five minutes of a lifetime were truly spent, and we felt young in a good way. I have since bought the record, and I would tell you what it was, but truthfully, it's not the same unless you're driving to your first real party, and you're sitting in the middle seat of a pickup with two nice people when it starts to rain.

Lately, though, he'd just been tired in general. Tired of people. Tired of books and TV and the nightly news and songs on the radio he'd heard years before and hadn't liked much in the first place. He was tired of his clothes and tired of his hair and tired of other people's clothes and other people's hair. He was tired of wishing things made sense. He'd gotten to a point where he was pretty sure he'd heard everything anyone had to say on any given subject and so it seemed he spent his days listening to old recordings of things that hadn't seemed fresh the first time he'd heard them. Maybe he was simply tired of life, of the absolute effort it took to get up every goddamned morning and walk out with into the same fucking day with only slight variations in the weather and food. He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.

When I think about the things that cause me pain or the things that cause me trouble or frustration, it's not people asking for my autograph; it's people breaking my heart. That happens to you whether you've sold millions of records or whether you're taking classes at college. You're going to believe people when they say that they love you. I don't leave out details when I write songs about that. I try to make my songs as personal as possible because, ultimately, my music started out as just trying to turn my diary entries into something that was a piece of music. And that has never changed.

History is a silent record of people who could not leave, it is a record of those who did not have a choice, you cannot leave when you have nowhere to go and have not the means to go there, you cannot leave when your children cannot get a passport, cannot go when your feet are rooted in the earth and to leave means tearing off your feet.

SEA OF LIFE This is not the end, my friend. Just as the ocean sings songs to infinity Our friendship too will flow onward Until the day one of us Turns and leaves And the seasons will turn too As our shells As they return back to sand And the tides that brought us Forth Will take us back Again. I will never leave you, my friend. Every time you see a wave rushing to Meet another, Two friends unite. Every time you see a wave crashing, Two friends depart. The journey will go on, my friend. Our memories are recorded In seashells To show and tell The lessons learned In these heavens and hells Part of this sea of life - And when the tide is right, We shall cross paths again When the ocean sings our song. Poetry by Suzy Kassem

The rhythm of her conversation. The perfection of her creation. The sex she slipped into my coffee. The way she felt when she first saw me. Hate to love and love to hate her. Like a broken record player. Back and forth and here and gone and on and on and on and on...

A legacy is not what is recorded in history books or repeated in song, but what is woven into the souls of those who remain. (from The General's Legacy)

Whenever I get dumped, I nail the door shut so that no one can come inside, get a towel and clip it around my neck so it's like a Superman cape, take off my shoes so I can slide across the room, and...get a fake mic, like a celery stick or a pen, and I play any record that features the vocalist Ronnie James Dio. And you can just pretend you're Dio, because on every album he does, he has minimum one, usually three, *EVIL WOMAN LOOK OUT!*- songs. And if you wanna point like Dio, it's a three-finger point. (heavy metal voice) 'The exit is that way. Evil LURKS! Evil lurks in twilight! Dances in the DARK! Evil woman! Just WALK AWAY!

Romance isn't just about roses or killing dragons or sailing a kayak around the world. It's also about chocolate chip cookies and sharing The Grateful Dead and James Taylor with me in the middle of the night, and believing me when I say that you could be bigger than both of them put together, and not making fun of me for straightening out my french fries or pointing my shoelaces in the same direction, and letting me pout when I don't get my own way, and pretending that if I play "Flower Drum Song" one more time you won't throw me and the record out the window

These days, everyone left a digital mark. All day, every day at Colton, people were snapping photos, recording every mundane moment as if it deserved to be preserved, remembered.

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet and my hair's off to one side and I feel like I've been in the foxhole all day. I don't think comfort is good for music. It's good to come out with skinned knuckles after wrestling with something you can't see. I like it when you come home at the end of the day from recording and someone says, "What happened to your hand?" And you don't even know. When you're in that place, you can dance on a broken ankle.

Art is memory made public. Time wins in the long run. Books turn to dust, negatives decay, records get worn out, civilizations burn. But as long as the art endures, a song or a view or a thought or a feeling someone once thought worth keeping is saved and stays shareable. Others can say, “I feel that too.

-You know how to call me although such a noise now would only confuse the air Neither of us can forget the steps we danced the words you stretched to call me out of dust Yes I long for you not just as a leaf for weather or vase for hands but with a narrow human longing that makes a man refuse any fields but his own I wait for you at an unexpected place in your journey like the rusted key or the feather you do not pick up.- -I WILL NEVER FIND THE FACES FOR ALL GOODBYES I'VE MADE.- For Anyone Dressed in Marble The miracle we all are waiting for is waiting till the Parthenon falls down and House of Birthdays is a house no more and fathers are unpoisoned by renown. The medals and the records of abuse can't help us on our pilgrimage to lust, but like whips certain perverts never use, compel our flesh in paralysing trust. I see an orphan, lawless and serene, standing in a corner of the sky, body something like bodies that have been, but not the scar of naming in his eye. Bred close to the ovens, he's burnt inside. Light, wind, cold, dark -- they use him like a bride. I Had It for a Moment I had it for a moment I knew why I must thank you I saw powerful governing men in black suits I saw them undressed in the arms of young mistresses the men more naked than the naked women the men crying quietly No that is not it I'm losing why I must thank you which means I'm left with pure longing How old are you Do you like your thighs I had it for a moment I had a reason for letting the picture of your mouth destroy my conversation Something on the radio the end of a Mexican song I saw the musicians getting paid they are not even surprised they knew it was only a job Now I've lost it completely A lot of people think you are beautiful How do I feel about that I have no feeling about that I had a wonderful reason for not merely courting you It was tied up with the newspapers I saw secret arrangements in high offices I saw men who loved their worldliness even though they had looked through big electric telescopes they still thought their worldliness was serious not just a hobby a taste a harmless affectation they thought the cosmos listened I was suddenly fearful one of their obscure regulations could separate us I was ready to beg for mercy Now I'm getting into humiliation I've lost why I began this I wanted to talk about your eyes I know nothing about your eyes and you've noticed how little I know I want you somewhere safe far from high offices I'll study you later So many people want to cry quietly beside you

I want it. I need it. Because all these records, they give me a language to decipher just how fucked I am. Because there is a void in my guts which can only be filled by songs.

...the Beatles were hard men too. Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption, but they were anything but sissies. They were from Liverpool, which is like Hamburg or Norfolk, Virginia--a hard, sea-farin' town, all these dockers and sailors around all the time who would beat the piss out of you if you so much as winked at them. Ringo's from the Dingle, which is like the f***ing Bronx. The Rolling Stones were the mummy's boys--they were all college students from the outskirts of London. They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability. I did like the Stones, but they were never anywhere near the Beatles--not for humour, not for originality, not for songs, not for presentation. All they had was Mick Jagger dancing about. Fair enough, the Stones made great records, but they were always s**t on stage, whereas the Beatles were the gear.

People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the big old cedars at the entrance to the maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived - maybe a million times more. Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of televisions programs, of e-mails, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I am going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscape we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it. Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

Barristan Semly was not a bookish man, but he had often glanced through the pages of the White Book, where the deeds of his predecessors had been recorded. Some had been heroes, some weaklings, knaves, or cravens. Most were only men - quicker and stronger than most, more skilled with sword and shield, but still prey to pride, ambition, lust, love, anger, jealousy, greed for gold, hunger for power, and all the other failing that afflicted lesser mortals. The best of them overcame their flaws, did their duty, and died with their swords in their hands. The worst ... The worst were those who played the game of thrones.

avant-garde, adj. This was after Alisa' show, the reverse-blackface rendition of Gone With the Wind, including songs from the Empire Records soundtrack and an interval of nineteenth-century German poetry, recited with a lisp. "What does avant-garde mean, anyway?" I asked. "I believe it translates as favor to your friends," you replied.

I always used to love singing. The first song I knew all the words to was ‘Girl of My Best Friend’ by Elvis. My dad introduced me to his music, and when I got given a karaoke machine by my granddad, my cousin and I recorded a load of Elvis tracks. I wish I still had them so I could have a listen.

She had died peacefully, in her sleep, after an evening of listening to all of her favorite Fred Astaire songs, one crackling record after another. Once the last chord of the last piece had died out, she had stood up and opened the French doors to the garden outside, perhaps waiting to breathe in the honeysuckle one more time.

I always say that anybody who’s single ― like Sara ― their love is the most intense love. The heartbreak they’re enduring is the most intense heartbreak. We cannot understand what Sara’s going through. When it’s love, it’s my love, you can’t understand it. You can’t compare. But I really related to where Sara was on this record. When she was writing these songs and coming to me like: You don’t understand, I was like: You’re right, but I also do.

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks of the river.

What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.

Don't tell anyone I'm a poet; they might want me to write a book. Don't tell 'em I can sing, or they'd want me to make records for that awful phonograph. Haven't time to be a public benefactor, so I'll just sing you this little song for your own amusement.

[A]s soon as you try and take a song from your mind into piano and voice and into the real world, something gets lost and it's like a moment where, in that moment you forget how it was and it's this new way. And then when you make a record, even those ideas that you had, then those get all turned and changed. So in the end, I think, it just becomes it's own thing and really I think a song could be recorded a million different ways and so what my records are, it just happened like that, but it's not like, this is how I planned it from the very beginning because I have no idea, I can't remember.

Recordings of Georgian folk polyphonic songs makes a great musical impression. They are recorded in a tradition of active reproduction of Georgian folk music the origin of which begins from ancient time. It is a wonderful finding and can give to the performance much more than all the modem music can... Yodel or "Krimanchuli" as it is called in Georgia is the best song which I have ever heard. ["America" magazine, No 23 1967]

Nick had sent me an email that day containing a link to a Joanna Newsom song. I sent back a link to the Billie Holiday recording of ‘I’m a Fool to Want You’, but he didn’t reply.

Inside the card, I told Sam that the present I gave her was given to me by my Aunt Helen. It was an old 45 record that had the Beatles' song "Something." I used to listen to it all the time when I was little and thinking about grown-up things. I would go to my bedroom window and stare at my reflection in the glass and the trees behind it and just listen to the song for hours. I decided them that when I met someone I thought was a beautiful as the song. I should give it to that person. And I didn't mean beautiful on the outside. I meant beautiful in all ways. So, I was giving it to Sam.

Ben had never seen his mother cry before, and it startled him, so he didn't ask again. Right afterward she'd put on her favorite record and played a mysterious song called "Space Oddity," about an astronaut named Major Tom who gets lost in space. She used to listen to the song over and over again. With her eyes closed, she'd place the palm of her hand against the fabric of the speaker, so she could feel it vibrate against her skin.

I aspire to different achievements than worldly success, and I know you do as well. But, Claire, I’m glad you finally saw reason and accepted the record deal. Your star is too bright to hide in plain sight.” “You just rhymed, Cletus. I might have to steal that for a song.” “Go ahead. I ain’t using it for anything profitable.

It's an old song that's been played on all the jukeboxes in America. The song has been around so long that it's been recorded on the very dust of America and it has settled on everything and changed chairs and cars and toys and lamps and windows into billions of phonographs to play that song back into the ear of our broken heart.

We have all the time in the world.' Love found a record. He laid it on the player. The music started again, scratchy from age, but so sweet and beautiful and deep. Someday. And there, in the darkness, Love and Death and the ones inside of them danced until the song was done. And then, when all around them was silent and still, they disappeared.

Crystal told me that Charlie Crowgard wrote a song about the fight. It’s called ‘Teakettle Woman and Broomstick Girl,’ and it’s so popular with the terra indigene who have heard it, he’s going to record it so the rest of us can hear it too.

Sometimes a radio station will get ONE phone call from ONE person who screams that he is going to complain to the FCC. Instead of the guy at the stating thinking about how many listeners love the song, want to hear it again, and will support the station for playing it, usually the guy panics -- and takes my records off the air. I object that. It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think 'I'm wrong.' The number of people who thought Hitler was 'right' did not make him 'right.' The same principle should be applied to anyone who has an individualistic attitude. Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

What came first--the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands-- literally thousands-- of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.

Stories are not just entertainment, not to me. A story records and transmits the experience of being human. It teaches us what it’s like to be who we are. Nothing but art can do this. There is no science that can capture the inner life. No words can describe it directly. We can only speak of it in metaphors. We can only say: it’s like this—this story, this picture, this song.

No one recorded what those marches were, though decades later there was an apocryphal and later-debunked story the one of the songs the British played was the on-the-nose "The World Turned Upside Down.

Pulsar: a dying star spinning under its own exploding anarchic energy, like a lighthouse on speed. A star the size of a city, a city the size of a star, whirling round and round, its death-song caught by a radio receiver, light years later, like a recorded message nobody heard, back-played now into infinity across time. Love and loss.

In the car, Evvie cranked an Avett Brothers record she hadn’t listened to in almost two years. Technically, the song was about dying, but it sounded like hope: When I lay down my fears, my hopes and my doubts; the rings on my fingers and the keys to my house; with no hard feelings…

Yesterday it was sun outside. The sky was blue and people were lying under blooming cherry trees in the park. It was Friday, so records were released, that people have been working on for years. Friends around me find success and level up, do fancy photo shoots and get featured on big, white, movie screens. There were parties and lovers, hand in hand, laughing perfectly loud, but I walked numbly through the park, round and round, 40 times for 4 hours just wanting to make it through the day. There's a weight that inhabits my chest some times. Like a lock in my throat, making it hard to breathe. A little less air got through and the sky was so blue I couldn’t look at it because it made me sad, swelling tears in my eyes and they dripped quietly on the floor as I got on with my day. I tried to keep my focus, ticked off the to-do list, did my chores. Packed orders, wrote emails, paid bills and rewrote stories, but the panic kept growing, exploding in my chest. Tears falling on the desk tick tick tick me not making a sound and some days I just don't know what to do. Where to go or who to see and I try to be gentle, soft and kind, but anxiety eats you up and I just want to be fine. This is not beautiful. This is not useful. You can not do anything with it and it tries to control you, throw you off your balance and lovely ways but you can not let it. I cleaned up. Took myself for a walk. Tried to keep my eyes on the sky. Stayed away from the alcohol, stayed away from the destructive tools we learn to use. the smoking and the starving, the running, the madness, thinking it will help but it only feeds the fire and I don't want to hurt myself anymore. I made it through and today I woke up, lighter and proud because I'm still here. There are flowers growing outside my window. The coffee is warm, the air is pure. In a few hours I'll be on a train on my way to sing for people who invited me to come, to sing, for them. My own songs, that I created. Me—little me. From nowhere at all. And I have people around that I like and can laugh with, and it's spring again. It will always be spring again. And there will always be a new day.

Everyone plays for someone, and Kris didn't play for the big dogs like Sabbath and Zep, she didn't play for the ones who made it, for the wizards who figured out how to turn their music into cars and cash and mansions and an endless party where no one ever gets old. She played for the losers. She played for the bands who never met their rainmaker, the musicians who drank too much and made all the wrong decisions. The singers who got shipped off to state hospitals because they couldn't handle living in the shadow of Black Iron Mountain. She played for the ones who recorded the wrong songs at the right times, and the right songs when it was wrong. The ones who blew it all recording an album that didn't fit the market, the ones who got dropped by their own labels, the singers who moved back home to live in their mom's basements.

All the men in Daddy's records sang of love with drastically imbalanced emotion. In the span of three minutes, they begged for it and kicked it to the curb. They turned to anybody, even to God, with a perpetual request: Please send me someone to love. But once they got it, love scrambled them.

Is it possible that the Pentateuch could not have been written by uninspired men? that the assistance of God was necessary to produce these books? Is it possible that Galilei ascertained the mechanical principles of 'Virtual Velocity,' the laws of falling bodies and of all motion; that Copernicus ascertained the true position of the earth and accounted for all celestial phenomena; that Kepler discovered his three laws—discoveries of such importance that the 8th of May, 1618, may be called the birth-day of modern science; that Newton gave to the world the Method of Fluxions, the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and the Decomposition of Light; that Euclid, Cavalieri, Descartes, and Leibniz, almost completed the science of mathematics; that all the discoveries in optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and chemistry, the experiments, discoveries, and inventions of Galvani, Volta, Franklin and Morse, of Trevithick, Watt and Fulton and of all the pioneers of progress—that all this was accomplished by uninspired men, while the writer of the Pentateuch was directed and inspired by an infinite God? Is it possible that the codes of China, India, Egypt, Greece and Rome were made by man, and that the laws recorded in the Pentateuch were alone given by God? Is it possible that Æschylus and Shakespeare, Burns, and Beranger, Goethe and Schiller, and all the poets of the world, and all their wondrous tragedies and songs are but the work of men, while no intelligence except the infinite God could be the author of the Pentateuch? Is it possible that of all the books that crowd the libraries of the world, the books of science, fiction, history and song, that all save only one, have been produced by man? Is it possible that of all these, the bible only is the work of God?

Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less previous in the bargain. I don't want to confuse artistic and commercial value, but it's just a fact that some kid who rips an album for free isn't going to give it the same attention he would if it cost him ten bucks. At what point does convenience become spiritual indolence? I realize this makes me sound like an old fart, but sometimes I get nostalgic for the days when the universe of recorded sound wasn't at our fingertips, when we had to hunt and wait and - horror of horrors - do without, when our longing for a particular record or song made it feel sacred.

Whatever he writes will mean You have not silenced me. Despite all your power, you are not all powerful. Men have often reduced his voice to gasps and weeping. They have crushed the power to speak from his body, from many bodies. But words written down outlive the vulnerability of the flesh. His songs will fly through the air like swallows. Recorded words can be passed along. In one form or another, they will be passed along. Movement is their essential nature.

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 which had anything to do with the world outside my Walkman. I was an English major, obsessed with Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater and Algernon Swinburne, thrilling to the exploits of my decadent aesthete poet idols, even though my only experience with decadence was reading about it.

Anything well done has the feeling of death to me, of being finished. I don't want to "master" anything. I want to spy, and sneak, and capture things just as they are . . . record all that comes before and after the song—jokes and fights and private moments. Having an unfillable hole inside is a great catalyst. You're always trying new things to fill it. People with holes look good! Look ready for action. But then sometimes you're home alone, and there's nothing new to try, and the hole's still there. "Hey," it growls, poking you from inside, "I'm hungry." I get tired of it! We are like two living cells inside a just-dead body—doomed, terrified. She argues herself out of anything she's working on, halfway through. As I stand there in the downpour and pull the mailbox open and drop my letter down the hole, I think about how Cindy is more beautiful, intelligent, and intricate than me, but still I have the winning point: whatever I do, even when I'm wrong, I go all the way. It's dark humor, but it's rooted in something real. What you present to the world is light humor. You keep it fun and fast-paced. No one can relate to that long-term. Struggle is what makes life rich—not success.

...Nature becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful and who you are and what is your special quest in life and whither you should go...You live on manna vouchsafed to you daily, miraculously. You stretch out arms for hidden gifts, you year toward the moonbeams and the stars, you listen with new ears to bird's songs and the murmurs of trees and streams....From day to day you keep your log, your day-book of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist's joy in creation.

Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive. There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burial field. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their existence as fragile as a scent in wind.

The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. She had kept some books since college that she had acquired for courses and never read—Fredric Jameson, for example, and Kant’s Critique of Judgment—but which suggested to her that she was, or might be, a person of seriousness, a thinker in some seeping, ubiquitous way; and she had kept, too, a handful of children’s books taken fro her now-dismantled girlhood room, like Charlotte’s Web and the Harriet the Spy novels, that conjured for her an earlier, passionately earnest self, the sober child who read constantly in the back of her parents’ Buick, oblivious to her brother punching her knee, oblivious to her parents’ squabbling, oblivious to the traffic and landscapes pressing upon her from outside the window. She had, in addition to her books, a modest shelf of tapes and CDs that served a similar, though narrower, function…she was aware that her collection was comprised largely of mainstream choices that reflected—whether popular or classical—not so much an individual spirit as the generic tastes of her times: Madonna, the Eurythmics, Tracy Chapman from her adolescence; Cecilia Bartoli, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Mitsuko Uchida; more recently Moby and the posthumously celebrated folk-singing woman from Washington, DC, who had died of a melanoma in her early thirties, and whose tragic tale attracted Danielle more than her familiar songs. Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate.

I will take you down my own avenue of remembrance, which winds among the hazards and shadows of my single year as a plebe. I cannot come to this story in full voice. I want to speak for the boys who were violated by this school, the ones who left ashamed and broken and dishonored, who departed from the Institute with wounds and bitter grievances. I want also to speak for the triumphant boys who took everything the system could throw at them, endured every torment and excess, and survived the ordeal of the freshman year with a feeling of transformation and achievement that they never had felt before and would never know again with such clarity and elation. I will speak from my memory- my memory- a memory that is all refracting light slanting through prisms and dreams, a shifting, troubled riot of electrons charged with pain and wonder. My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essentional fire that is poetry itself. But i will try to isolate that one lonely singer who gathered the fragments of my plebe year and set the screams to music. For many years, I have refused to listen as his obsessive voice narrated the malignant litany of crimes against my boyhood. We isolate those poets who cause us the greatest pain; we silence them in any way we can. I have never allowed this furious dissident the courtesy of my full attention. His poems are songs for the dead to me. Something dies in me every time I hear his low, courageous voice calling to me from the solitude of his exile. He has always known that someday I would have to listen to his story, that I would have to deal with the truth or falsity of his witness. He has always known that someday I must take full responsibility for his creation and that, in finally listening to him, I would be sounding the darkest fathoms of myself. I will write his stories now as he shouts them to me. I will listen to him and listen to myself. I will get it all down. Yet the laws of recall are subject to distortion and alienation. Memory is a trick, and I have lied so often to myself about my own role and the role of others that I am not sure I can recognize the truth about those days. But I have come to believe in the unconscious integrity of lies. I want to record even them. Somewhere in the immensity of the lie the truth gleams like the pure, light-glazed bones of an extinct angel. Hidden in the enormous falsity of my story is the truth for all of us who began at the Institute in 1963, and for all who survived to become her sons. I write my own truth, in my own time, in my own way, and take full responsibility for its mistakes and slanders. Even the lies are part of my truth. I return to the city of memory, to the city of exiled poets. I approach the one whose back is turned to me. He is frail and timorous and angry. His head is shaved and he fears the judgment of regiments. He will always be a victim, always a plebe. I tap him on the shoulder. "Begin," I command. "It was the beginning of 1963," he begins, and I know he will not stop until the story has ended.

I was not a great man whose history has been recorded for children to study in school. No bells will ring for me, no flags descend upon their mast. For I was an ordinary man, my son, one of many, with ordinary hopes and ordinary dreams and ordinary fears. I, too, dreamed of wealth and riches, health and strength. I, too, feared hunger and poverty, war and weakness. I was the neighbour who lived in the next house. The man standing in the subway on his way to work: who held a match to his cigarette: who walked with his dog. I was the soldier shaking with fear: the man berating the umpire at the ball game: the citizen in the privacy of the voting booth, happily electing the worthless candidate. I was the man who lived a thousand times and died a thousand times in all man’s six thousand years of record. I was the man who sailed with Noah  in his ark, who was the multitude that crossed the sea that Moses held apart, who hung from the cross next to Christ. I was the ordinary man about whom songs are never written, stories are never told, legends are never remembered.

Then I’ll haste to wed a sailor, and send him off to sea, For a life of independence, is the pleasant life for me. But every now and then I shall like to see his face, For it always seems to me to beam with manly grace, With his brow so nobly open, and his dark and kindly eye, Oh my heart beats fondly towards him whenever he is nigh. But when he says “Goodbye my love, I’m off across the sea,” First I cry for his departure, then laugh because I’m free. (“Nantucket Girl’s Song,” as recorded in Eliza Brock’s journal)

The story of the rapper and the story of the hustler are like rap itself, two kinds of rhythm working together, having a conversation with each other, doing more together than they could do apart. It's been said that the thing that makes rap special, that makes it different both from pop music and from written poetry, is that it's built around two kinds of rhythm. The first kind of rhythm is the meter. In poetry, the meter is abstract, but in rap, the meter is something you literally hear: it's the beat. The beat in a song never stops, it never varies. No matter what other sounds are on the track, even if it's a Timbaland production with all kinds of offbeat fills and electronics, a rap song is usually built bar by bar, four-beat measure by four-beat measure. It's like time itself, ticking off relentlessly in a rhythm that never varies and never stops. When you think about it like that, you realize the beat is everywhere, you just have to tap into it. You can bang it out on a project wall or an 808 drum machine or just use your hands. You can beatbox it with your mouth. But the beat is only one half of a rap song's rhythm. The other is the flow. When a rapper jumps on a beat, he adds his own rhythm. Sometimes you stay in the pocket of the beat and just let the rhymes land on the square so that the beat and flow become one. But sometimes the flow cops up the beat, breaks the beat into smaller units, forces in multiple syllables and repeated sounds and internal rhymes, or hangs a drunken leg over the last bap and keeps going, sneaks out of that bitch. The flow isn't like time, it's like life. It's like a heartbeat or the way you breathe, it can jump, speed up, slow down, stop, or pound right through like a machine. If the beat is time, flow is what we do with that time, how we live through it. The beat is everywhere, but every life has to find its own flow. Just like beats and flows work together, rapping and hustling, for me at least, live through each other. Those early raps were beautiful in their way and a whole generation of us felt represented for the first time when we heard them. But there's a reason the culture evolved beyond that playful, partying lyrical style. Even when we recognized the voices, and recognized the style, and even personally knew the cats who were on the records, the content didn't always reflect the lives we were leading. There was a distance between what was becoming rap's signature style - the relentlessness, the swagger, the complex wordplay - and the substance of the songs. The culture had to go somewhere else to grow. It had to come home.

Here, then, happiness is obviously a form of strength, a subversion even, a modus of survival, even if at times it appears superficial and misplaced. Besides, for all of boxing's brutality, there is lyricism in its rhythm, too, something that dreamy, romantic Filipinos perhaps recognize. It is almost too facile to ascribe too much significance in this metaphor, but this incongruous combination of lyrical violence is default in Manila, where beauty is scarce, and which flourishes side by side with the hideous. There is pride in that stubborn independence, I think, whether it is on the canvas of a boxing ring or history. How did that killer song end again? The record shows I took the blows and did it my way.

Uh-oh," Will muttered. "This is going to be ... interesting." It turned out the creative genius behind the movie was Will's dad - the god Apollo, which meant this was not going to be a typical orientation flick. No, as we soon found out, Apollo had written, directed, produced, hosted and starred in ... a variety show. For those of you who don't know what a variety show is, imagine a talent show on steroids, complete with canned laughter, pre-recorded applause, and an extra-large helping of hokeyness. For the next hour, we cringe-watched as Apollo and our demigod predecessors performed in song-and-dance numbers, recited poetry, acted in comedy sketches and harmonized in a musical group called the Lyre Choir. Naturally, Apollo featured prominently in most of the acts. The one of him hula-hooping shirtless while satyrs capered around with long rainbow ribbons on sticks ... you can't unsee that kind of thing.

Anger is an energy. It really bloody is. It’s possibly the most powerful one-liner I’ve ever come up with. When I was writing the Public Image Ltd song ‘Rise’, I didn’t quite realize the emotional impact that it would have on me, or anyone who’s ever heard it since. I wrote it in an almost throwaway fashion, off the top of my head, pretty much when I was about to sing the whole song for the first time, at my then new home in Los Angeles. It’s a tough, spontaneous idea. ‘Rise’ was looking at the context of South Africa under apartheid. I’d be watching these horrendous news reports on CNN, and so lines like ‘They put a hotwire to my head, because of the things I did and said’, are a reference to the torture techniques that the apartheid government was using out there. Insufferable. You’d see these reports on TV and in the papers, and feel that this was a reality that simply couldn’t be changed. So, in the context of ‘Rise’, ‘Anger is an energy’ was an open statement, saying, ‘Don’t view anger negatively, don’t deny it – use it to be creative.’ I combined that with another refrain, ‘May the road rise with you’. When I was growing up, that was a phrase my mum and dad – and half the surrounding neighbourhood, who happened to be Irish also – used to say. ‘May the road rise, and your enemies always be behind you!’ So it’s saying, ‘There’s always hope’, and that you don’t always have to resort to violence to resolve an issue. Anger doesn’t necessarily equate directly to violence. Violence very rarely resolves anything. In South Africa, they eventually found a relatively peaceful way out. Using that supposedly negative energy called anger, it can take just one positive move to change things for the better. When I came to record the song properly, the producer and I were arguing all the time, as we always tend to do, but sometimes the arguing actually helps; it feeds in. When it was released in early 1986, ‘Rise’ then became a total anthem, in a period when the press were saying that I was finished, and there was nowhere left for me to go. Well, there was, and I went there. Anger is an energy. Unstoppable.

Here’s the point. If I had waited until the songs were finished, this thing might never have happened. If I had merely tinkered with these songs for all the years it took to finally record them, chances are I would have moved on to other things and never given it a try. It wouldn’t have grown into what it was meant to be. You can think and plan and think some more, but none of that is half as important as doing something, however imperfect or incomplete it is. Intention trumps execution, remember? Sometimes you book the tour before the songs are written. Sometimes you stand at the altar and say “I do” without any clue how you and your wife are going to make it. Sometimes you move to Nashville with no money in the bank and no real prospects. Sometimes you start with nothing and hope it all works out. Not sometimes—every time. All you really have is your willingness to fail, coupled with the mountain of evidence that the Maker has never left nor forsaken you.

It's a complex song, and it's fascinating to watch the creative process as they went back and forth and finally created it over a few months. Lennon was always my favorite Beatle. [ He laughs as Lennon stops during the first take and makes the band go back and revise a chord.] Did you hear that little detour they took? It didn't work, so they went back and started from where they were. It's so raw in this version. It actually makes the sound like mere mortals. You could actually imagine other people doing this, up to this version. Maybe not writing and conceiving it, but certainly playing it. Yet they just didn't stop. They were such perfectionists they kept it going This made a big impression on me when I was in my thirties. You could just tell how much they worked at this. They did a bundle of work between each of these recording. They kept sending it back to make it closer to perfect.[ As he listens to the third take, he points out how instrumentation has gotten more complex.] The way we build stuff at Apple is often this way. Even the number of models we'd make of a new notebook or iPod. We would start off with a version and then begin refining and refining, doing detailed models of the design, or the buttons, or how a function operates. It's a lot of work, but in the end it just gets better, and soon it's like, " Wow, how did they do that?!? Where are the screws?

Trolls have existed on this planet for as long as humans. This is what I was told and what I translated to Tub. The first mention of them in recorded history is from ninth-century Norway, when the nefarious creatures began showing up in song, verse, and bedtime stories to keep misbehaving children in line. According to Norse folklore, trolls are one of the Dark Beings, the purest embodiments of evil, and they scurried from between the toes of Ymir, the mythic six-headed Frost Giant whose murdered body became the universe in which we live; his bones became the mountains, his teeth boulders, and so forth.

Bhagat Singh revered Lajpat Rai as a leader. But he would not spare even Lajpat Rai, when, during the last years of his life, Lajpat Rai turned to communal politics. He then launched a political-ideological campaign against him. Because Lajpat Rai was a respected leader, he would not publicly use harsh words of criticism against him. And so he printed as a pamphlet Robert Browning’s famous poem, ‘The Lost Leader,’ in which Browning criticizes Wordsworth for turning against liberty. The poem begins with the line ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us.’ A few more of the poem’s lines were: ‘We shall march prospering, not thro’ his presence; Songs may inspirit us, not from his lyre,’ and ‘Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more.’ There was not one word of criticism of Lajpat Rai. Only, on the front cover, he printed Lajpat Rai’s photograph!

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 was the suitor that won her hand. They tell me this story, laughing and interrupting each other, as their teenage daughter walks through the kitchen on her way out to a Halloween party. I've heard of these postcards - over the years, I've heard plenty of record-collector guys boast that they own the original vinyl Exile on Main Street with the original postcards, intact and pristine in the virgin sleeve. I've never heard of anybody getting rid of their prized Exile postcards, much less actually writing on them and sending them through the mail to a girl. I watch these two, laughing over this story at the same kitchen table they've shared for thirty years. I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

As a songwriter, I'm gathering clues and possibilities all the time, whether I see a piano that day or not. I've tried to explain to people how I collect these dispatches, because I think anybody can do what I'm talking about. Once I do plug in, I might get only one line and two bar phrases of the melody. I always have elements of songs around that may never ever get recorded. As far back as Little Earthquakes, I began to realize that I needed to have a library of notes, phrases, words, things that might prove useful at any given time. Within a few months' time I'll gather hundreds of those fragments. Half won't be used. And then the craft comes in, the part that is about painting a world. You want listeners to smell the lavender, to feel the point of those knitting needles in a handbag of the granny who happens to harbor a loyalty to Madame Defarge. You want the listener to know the wood's burning in the stove when they walk into the song with me. Music is about all of your senses, not just hearing.

There is a feeling that I had Friday night after the homecoming game that I don't know if I will ever be able to describe except to say that it is warm. Sam and Patrick drove me to the party that night, and I sat in the middle of Sam's pickup truck. Sam loves her pick up truck because I think it reminds her of her dad.The feeling I had happened when Sam told Patrick to find a station on the radio. And kept getting commercials. And commercials. And a really bad song about love that had the word "baby" in it. And then more commercials. And finally he found this really amazing song about this boy, and we all got quiet. Sam tapped her hand on the steering wheel. Patrick held his hand outside the car and made air waves. And I just sat between them. After the song finished I said something. "I feel infinite" And Sam and Patrick looked at me like I said the greatest thing they ever heard. Because the song was the greatest and we all paid attention to it.Five minutes of a lifetime were truly spent,and we felt young in a good way. I have since bought the record, and I would tell you what it is, but truthfully, it's not the same unless you're driving to your first real part, and you're sitting in the middle seat of a pickup with two nice people when it starts to rain.

In The Garret Four little chests all in a row, Dim with dust, and worn by time, All fashioned and filled, long ago, By children now in their prime. Four little keys hung side by side, With faded ribbons, brave and gay When fastened there, with childish pride, Long ago, on a rainy day. Four little names, one on each lid, Carved out by a boyish hand, And underneath there lieth hid Histories of the happy band Once playing here, and pausing oft To hear the sweet refrain, That came and went on the roof aloft, In the falling summer rain. 'Meg' on the first lid, smooth and fair. I look in with loving eyes, For folded here, with well-known care, A goodly gathering lies, The record of a peaceful life-- Gifts to gentle child and girl, A bridal gown, lines to a wife, A tiny shoe, a baby curl. No toys in this first chest remain, For all are carried away, In their old age, to join again In another small Meg's play. Ah, happy mother! Well I know You hear, like a sweet refrain, Lullabies ever soft and low In the falling summer rain. 'Jo' on the next lid, scratched and worn, And within a motley store Of headless dolls, of schoolbooks torn, Birds and beasts that speak no more, Spoils brought home from the fairy ground Only trod by youthful feet, Dreams of a future never found, Memories of a past still sweet, Half-writ poems, stories wild, April letters, warm and cold, Diaries of a wilful child, Hints of a woman early old, A woman in a lonely home, Hearing, like a sad refrain-- 'Be worthy, love, and love will come,' In the falling summer rain. My Beth! the dust is always swept From the lid that bears your name, As if by loving eyes that wept, By careful hands that often came. Death canonized for us one saint, Ever less human than divine, And still we lay, with tender plaint, Relics in this household shrine-- The silver bell, so seldom rung, The little cap which last she wore, The fair, dead Catherine that hung By angels borne above her door. The songs she sang, without lament, In her prison-house of pain, Forever are they sweetly blent With the falling summer rain. Upon the last lid's polished field-- Legend now both fair and true A gallant knight bears on his shield, 'Amy' in letters gold and blue. Within lie snoods that bound her hair, Slippers that have danced their last, Faded flowers laid by with care, Fans whose airy toils are past, Gay valentines, all ardent flames, Trifles that have borne their part In girlish hopes and fears and shames, The record of a maiden heart Now learning fairer, truer spells, Hearing, like a blithe refrain, The silver sound of bridal bells In the falling summer rain. Four little chests all in a row, Dim with dust, and worn by time, Four women, taught by weal and woe To love and labor in their prime. Four sisters, parted for an hour, None lost, one only gone before, Made by love's immortal power, Nearest and dearest evermore. Oh, when these hidden stores of ours Lie open to the Father's sight, May they be rich in golden hours, Deeds that show fairer for the light, Lives whose brave music long shall ring, Like a spirit-stirring strain, Souls that shall gladly soar and sing In the long sunshine after rain

What if . . . what if heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you're dying of thirst, or when someone's nice to your for no reason, or . . . ' Mam's pancakes with Mars Bar sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, 'Sleep tight don't let the bedbugs bite'; or Jacko and Sharon singing "For She's a Squishy Marshmallow' instead of 'For She's A Jolly Good Fellow' every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it's not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. "S'pose heaven's not like a painting that's just hanging there forever, but more like . . . like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you're alive, from passing cars, or . . . upstairs windows when you're lost . . .

A neurosurgeon once told me about operating on the brain of a young man with epilepsy. As is customary in this kind of operation, the patient was wide awake, under only local anesthesia, while the surgeon delicately explored his exposed cortex, makingsure that the parts tentatively to be removed were not absolutely vital by stimulating them electrically and asking the patient what he experienced. Some stimulations provoked visual flashes or hand-raisings, others a sort of buzzing sensation, but one spot produced a delighted response from the patient: "It's 'Outta Get Me' by Guns N' Roses. my favorite heavy metal band!" I asked the neurosurgeon If he had asked the patient to sing or hum along with the music, since it would be fascinating to learn how "high fidelity" the provoked memory was, would it be in exactly the same key and tempo as the record? Such a song (unliken"Silent Night") has one canonical version. so we could simply have superimposed a recording of the patients humming with the standard record and compared the results. Unfortunately, even though a tape recorder had been running during the operation, thesurgeon hadn't asked the patient to sing along. ''Why not?" I asked, and he replied: "I hate rock music!' Later in the conversation the neurosurgeon happened to remark that he was going to have to operate again on the same young man. and I expressed the hope that he would just check to see if he could restimulate the rock music, and this time ask the fellow to sing along. "I can't do it." replied the neurosurgeon. "since I cut out that part." "It was part of the epileptic focus?" I asked. "No,'' the surgeon replied, ''I already told you — I hate rock music.

The Chicago historian Studs Terkel asked Bob Dylan in the sixties about how he went about writing a song and trying to outdo himself, or at least being as good as the last song he wrote, and his response was pretty damn perfect. “I’m content with the same old piece of wood,” he said. “I just want to find another place to pound a nail . . . Music, my writing, is something special, not sacred.” If the songs Bob Dylan wrote aren’t sacred, then nobody’s songs are sacred. Nobody’s. No one has ever laid on their deathbed thinking, “Thank god I didn’t make that song. Thank god I didn’t make that piece of art. Thank god I avoided the embarrassment of putting a bad poem into the world.” Nobody reaches the end of their life and regrets even a single moment of creating something, no matter how shitty or unappreciated that something might have been. I’m writing this just weeks after returning from Belleville, where I sat next to my dad’s bed in my childhood house and watched him die. I can guarantee you that in the final moments of his life, he wasn’t kicking himself for all those times when he dared to make a fool of himself by singing too loud.

Music is reflection of self We just explain it, and then we get our checks in the mail It's fucked up, ain't it? How we can come from practically nothin To bein able to have any f*ckin thing that we wanted That's why we sing for these kids who don't have a thing Except for a dream and a f*ckin rap magazine Who post pin-up pictures on they walls all day long Idolize they favorite rappers and know all they songs Or for anyone who's ever been through shit in they lives So they sit and they cry, at night, wishin they'd die Til they throw on a rap record and they sit and they vibe We're nothin to you, but we're the f*ckin sh*t in they eyes That's why we seize the moment Try to freeze it and own it, squeeze it and hold it Cause we consider these minutes golden And maybe they'll admit it when we're gone Just let our spirits live on Through our lyrics that you hear in our songs, and we can…

Some of my favorite songs: 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' by Neil Young; 'Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Loved Me' by the Smiths; 'Call Me' by Aretha Franklin; 'I Don't Want to Talk About It' by anybody. And then there's 'Love Hurts' and 'When Love Breaks Down' and 'How Can You Mend a Broken Heart' and 'The Speed of the Sound of Loneliness' and 'She's Gone' and 'I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself 'and . . . some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average (three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one. How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong? What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.

Lake Michigan, impossibly blue, the morning light bouncing toward the city. Lake Michigan frozen in sheets you could walk on but wouldn't dare. Lake Michigan, gray out a high-rise window, indistinguishable from the sky. Bread, hot from the oven. Or even stale in the restaurant basket, rescued by salty butter. The Cubs winning the pendant someday. The Cubs winning the Series. The Cubs continuing to lose. His favorite song, not yet written. His favorite movie, not yet made. The depth of an oil brushstroke. Chagall's blue window. Picasso's blue man and his guitar. ... The sound of an old door creaking open. The sound of garlic cooking. The sound of typing. The sound of commercials from the next room, when you were in the kitchen getting a drink. The sound of someone else finishing a shower. ... Dancing till the floor was an optional landing place. Dancing elbows out, dancing with arms up, dancing in a pool of sweat. All the books he hadn't started. The man at Wax Trax! Records with the beautiful eyelashes. The man who sat every Saturday at Nookies, reading the Economist and eating eggs, his ears always strangely red. The ways his own life might have intersected with theirs, given enough time, enough energy, a better universe. The love of his life. Wasn't there supposed to be a love of his life? ... His body, his own stupid, slow, hairy body, its ridiculous desires, its aversions, its fears. The way his left knee cracked in the cold. The sun, the moon, the sky, the stars. The end of every story. Oak trees. Music. Breath. ...

I am slowly learning to disregard the insatiable desire to be special. I think it began, the soft piano ballad of epiphanic freedom that danced in my head, when you mentioned that "Van Gogh was her thing" while I stood there in my overall dress, admiring his sunflowers at the art museum. And then again on South Street, while we thumbed through old records and I picked up Morrissey and you mentioned her name like it was stuck in your teeth. Each time, I felt a paintbrush on my cheeks, covering my skin in grey and fading me into a quiet, concealed background that hummed everything you've ever loved has been loved before, and everything you are has already been on an endless loop. It echoed in your wrists that I stared at, walking (home) in the middle of the street, and I felt like a ghost moving forward in an eternal line, waiting to haunt anyone who thought I was worth it. But no one keeps my name folded in their wallet. Only girls who are able to carve their names into paintings and vinyl live in pockets and dust bunnies and bathroom mirrors. And so be it, that I am grey and humming in the background. I am forgotten Sundays and chipped fingernail polish and borrowed sheets. I'm the song you'll get stuck in your head, but it will remind you of someone else. I am 2 in the afternoon, I am the last day of winter, I am a face on the sidewalk that won't show up in your dreams. And I am everywhere, and I am nothing at all.

One day in the next five hundred billion years, while the probes complete one full circuit of the Milky Way, maybe they’ll stumble upon intelligent life. In forty thousand years or so, when the two probes sail close enough to a planetary system, maybe just maybe one of these plants will be home to some life form which will spy the probe with whatever it has that passes for eyes, stay its telescope, retrieve the derelict fuel-less old probe with whatever it has that passes for curiosity, lower the stylus (supplied) to the record with whatever it has that passes for digits, and set free the dadadadaa of Beethoven’s Fifth. It’ll roll like thunder through a different frontier. Human music will permeate the Milky Way’s outer reaches. There’ll be Chuck Berry and Bach, there’ll be Stravinsky and Blind Willie Johnson, and the didgeridoo, violin, slide guitar and shakuhachi. Whale song will drift through the constellation of Ursa Minor. Perhaps a being on a planet of the star AC +793888 will hear the 1970s recording of sheep bleat, laughter, footsteps, and the soft pluck of a kiss. Perhaps they’ll hear the trundle of a tractor and the voice of a child. When they hear on the phonograph a recording of rapid firecracker drills and bursts, will they know that these sounds denote brainwaves? Will they ever infer that over forty thousand years before in a solar system unknown a woman was rigged to an EEG and her thoughts recorded? Could they know to work backwards from the abstract sounds and translate them once more into brainwaves, and could they know from these brainwaves the kinds of thoughts the woman was having? Could they see into a human’s mind? Could they know she was a young woman in love? Could they tell from this dip and rise in the EEG’s pattern that she was thinking simultaneously of earth and lover as if the two were continuous? Could they see that, though she tried to keep her mental script, to bring to mind Lincoln and the Ice Age and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and whatever grand things have shaped the earth and which she wished to convey to an alien audience, every thought cascaded into the drawn brows and proud nose of her lover, the wonderful articulation of his hands and the way he listened like a bird and how they had touched so often without touching. And then a spike in sound as she thought of that great city Alexandria and of nuclear disarmament and the symphony of the earth’s tides and the squareness of his jaw and the way he spoke with such bright precision so that everything he said was epiphany and discovery and the way he looked at her as though she were the epiphany he kept on having and the thud of her heart and the flooding how heat about her body when she considered what it was he wanted to do to her and the migration of bison across a Utah plain and a geisha’s expressionless face and the knowledge of having found that thing in the world which she ought never to have had the good fortune of finding, of two minds and bodies flung at each other at full dumbfounding force so that her life had skittered sidelong and all her pin-boned plans just gone like that and her self engulfed in a fire of longing and thoughts of sex and destiny, the completeness of love, their astounding earth, his hands, his throat, his bare back.

Expanding further on his own observations of Prince’s writing style(s) during the course of the album’s recording, fellow Paisley Park engineer Eddie Miller, who engineered the recording of ‘Electric Chair’ among other Prince recordings during the Batman era, recalled that “he would write all sorts of ways. I have to admit that I listened to some of his cassette demos that he would sometimes bring into the studio to reference (as I remember, he would hold the cassette player up to his ear, so you couldn’t really hear it.). They were fascinating. His cassette demo technique was extremely crude but ingenious—it’s like something you’d do if you had no access to any equipment. He’d use two cheap cassette recorders. If he wanted to hear drums, he’d record a human beat box rhythm for the length of the song—and most likely, he’d have the form of the song in his head while he was recording this. By the way, it was the same in the studio when he’d do his one man band approach to recording a song. He’d know the song in his head, and start out recording the drums for the song (it would essentially become the ‘click track’—the way a click track should be). Back to the cassette demo—he’d then play his beat box groove over the speaker on the cassette recorder and sing the bass line while recording all this onto the second cassette machine. He’d build up a rhythm track this way, and then add vocals. And there’s your demo.

To the enormous majority of persons who risk themselves in literature, not even the smallest measure of success can fall. They had better take to some other profession as quickly as may be, they are only making a sure thing of disappointment, only crowding the narrow gates of fortune and fame. Yet there are others to whom success, though easily within their reach, does not seem a thing to be grasped at. Of two such, the pathetic story may be read, in the Memoir of A Scotch Probationer, Mr. Thomas Davidson, who died young, an unplaced Minister of the United Presbyterian Church, in 1869. He died young, unaccepted by the world, unheard of, uncomplaining, soon after writing his latest song on the first grey hairs of the lady whom he loved. And she, Miss Alison Dunlop, died also, a year ago, leaving a little work newly published, Anent Old Edinburgh, in which is briefly told the story of her life. There can hardly be a true tale more brave and honourable, for those two were eminently qualified to shine, with a clear and modest radiance, in letters. Both had a touch of poetry, Mr. Davidson left a few genuine poems, both had humour, knowledge, patience, industry, and literary conscientiousness. No success came to them, they did not even seek it, though it was easily within the reach of their powers. Yet none can call them failures, leaving, as they did, the fragrance of honourable and uncomplaining lives, and such brief records of these as to delight, and console and encourage us all. They bequeath to us the spectacle of a real triumph far beyond the petty gains of money or of applause, the spectacle of lives made happy by literature, unvexed by notoriety, unfretted by envy. What we call success could never have yielded them so much, for the ways of authorship are dusty and stony, and the stones are only too handy for throwing at the few that, deservedly or undeservedly, make a name, and therewith about one-tenth of the wealth which is ungrudged to physicians, or barristers, or stock-brokers, or dentists, or electricians. If literature and occupation with letters were not its own reward, truly they who seem to succeed might envy those who fail. It is not wealth that they win, as fortunate men in other professions count wealth; it is not rank nor fashion that come to their call nor come to call on them. Their success is to be let dwell with their own fancies, or with the imaginations of others far greater than themselves; their success is this living in fantasy, a little remote from the hubbub and the contests of the world. At the best they will be vexed by curious eyes and idle tongues, at the best they will die not rich in this world’s goods, yet not unconsoled by the friendships which they win among men and women whose faces they will never see. They may well be content, and thrice content, with their lot, yet it is not a lot which should provoke envy, nor be coveted by ambition.

Arianna simply wasn’t up to it. She had a pretty voice, she could carry a tune—that was never a problem. But she had no depth. She couldn’t interpret a song, place her stamp on it. Unlike Lesley, who fairly stomped on it! And that’s what you need in folk music. These are songs that have been around for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. They existed for centuries before any kind of recording was possible, even before people could write, for god’s sake! So the only way those songs lived and got passed on was by singers. The better singer you were, the more likely it was people were going to turn out to hear you and remember you—and remember the song—whether it was at a pub or wedding or ceilidh or just a knot of people seeking shelter under a tree during a storm. It’s a kind of time machine, really, the way you can trace a song from whoever’s singing it now back through the years—Dylan or Johnny Cash, Joanna Newsom or Vashti Bunyan—on through all those nameless folk who kept it alive a thousand years ago. People talk about carrying the torch, but I always think of that man they found in the ice up in the Alps. He’d been under the snow for 1,200 years, and when they discovered him, he was still wearing his clothes, a cloak of woven grass and a bearskin cap, and in his pocket they found a little bag of grass and tinder and a bit of dead coal. That was the live spark he’d been carrying, the bright ember he kept in his pocket to start a fire whenever he stopped. You’d have to be so careful, more careful than we can even imagine, to keep that one spark alive. Because that’s what kept you alive, in the cold and the dark. Folk music is like that. And by folk I mean whatever music it is that you love, whatever music it is that sustains you. It’s the spark that keeps us alive in the cold and night, the fire we all gather in front of so we know we’re not alone in the dark. And the longer I live, the colder and darker it gets. A song like “Windhover Morn” can keep your heart beating when the doctors can’t. You might laugh at that, but it’s true.