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

'Drive,' that's the one. I love dozens of songs by R.E.M., but that's the one, even though it took me 7 or 8 years to start liking it.

'The Queen Is Dead' is not merely the Smiths' best album, but it is one of those timeless, perfect, inexhaustible artifacts that could only have been made by a gang of sullen, sun-deprived rock & roll boys fighting off adulthood tooth and nail.

'American Horror' is the debasement of the suburban family, the way a lonely kid would have imagined it in the Seventies.

Thank you for the music, Sleater-Kinney. This gang of three was the best American punk rock band ever. Ever.

Tonight, I feel like my whole body is made out of memories. I'm a mix-tape, a cassette that's been rewound so many times you can hear the fingerprints smudged on the tape.

Every moment of my life has a soundtrack, so I never know when some song is going to jump me by surprise and bring the memory alive.