Music

There is a version of yourself that the world knows and a version that exists when the world is not looking. For most people the distance between these two versions is manageable — a matter of degree rather than kind, the public self a somewhat more polished or more guarded version of the private one. … Read more

There are mornings that arrive after nights that should not have been survived. Nights so heavy with loss that the act of continuing — of breathing, of existing in time, of being a person in a world that has just done something irreversible — feels like an offense against the magnitude of what has happened. … Read more

December 8th, 1980. The news moved through the music world the way terrible news moves — in waves, person by person, each person absorbing it and then reaching for the phone because the absorbing required another person to absorb it with. John Lennon was gone. Shot outside his home in New York by a man … Read more

David Bowie’s relationship with his own work was one of the most complex and least sentimental in the history of popular music. He was not a man who clung to what he had made. The famous persona changes — Ziggy Stardust to Aladdin Sane to the Thin White Duke to the Berlin period and beyond … Read more

Neil Young has a complicated relationship with his own catalog. He is famously inconsistent about what gets released and what gets withheld, about what he considers finished and what he considers private, about the difference between music that belongs to the world and music that belongs to specific people or specific moments that the world … Read more

Tom Waits has always operated by a different set of rules than the music industry around him. Not as a pose — not as the calculated eccentricity of someone who has determined that unconventionality is a marketable position. But as the genuine expression of a man who has a specific relationship with music that has … Read more

Creative fear is a specific and unusual emotion. It is not the fear of failure — most artists know that fear well and have developed relationships with it that are functional if not comfortable. Creative fear is the fear that arrives when something has succeeded beyond the limits of your own comprehension. When you have … Read more

There are conversations that exist outside the official record of a life. That happen in the margins of the documented story — in the hours between midnight and dawn, in rooms without cameras or journalists or the particular self-consciousness that comes from knowing that what you say will be quoted and attributed and analyzed. The … Read more

There are moments that arrive in a life with such force that the ordinary responses — the phone calls, the grief, the practical management of shock — feel completely inadequate to what has actually happened. Moments where the only thing that makes any sense at all is to go somewhere alone and do the thing … Read more