The scarcity of the music not only makes the music itself enjoyable but it also gives the collector a strange sense of superiority.

Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind.

Death metal uses a lot of white face paint and black hair dye to make its point. I quite enjoy this genre for its intensity, extremism and underlying irony: You have to be alive to play it and listen to it.

The more you own, the more it owns you.

You could split hairs and bring up words like 'doo-wop' and terms like 'soul' or 'R&B', but I think pop music is what you want it to be - that's why it's pop.

In the worst of times the best among us never lose their moral compass, and that is how they emerge relatively unscathed.

Seasonal change in Los Angeles is often a very subtle thing. It's not as if we finally stop having to shovel the snow out of our driveways and can put our parkas back in the closet.