A song nobody likes is a sad thing. But a love song nobody likes is hardly a thing at all.

You can't beat the beehive for glam punkette attitude.

But bringing people together is what music has always done best.

It was bewildering and humbling to keep discovering how many brave things people can fail to talk themselves out of doing.

One nice thing about growing up Catholic is it makes you open-minded about other people's religions, since ours is nuttier than yours.

Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture, 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties, predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties, except more so, in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before.

But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies.