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.

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

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

I didn't know what I was. I didn't have a noun.

When I started out as a music journalist, at the end of the 1980s, it was generally assumed that we were living through the lamest music era the world would ever see. But those were also the years when hip-hop exploded, beatbox disco soared, indie rock took off, and new wave invented a language of teen angst.

Celebrity despicability is a precious thing.

The times you lived through, the people you shared those times with — nothing brings it all to life like an old mix tape. It does a better job of storing up memories than actual brain tissue can do. Every mix tape tells a story. Put them together, and they can add up to the story of a life.