Q & A with Music Issue Contributors

We quizzed each of our Music Issue contributors on their most embarrassing concert moments, the first songs they fell in love with, their rock-star run-ins, and more.

DOLORES ALFIERI

Why is music important to you?
 
Why not ask me why breathing is important to me?

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach.” I was a wee-one, had no idea what she was talking about, and when I grew old enough to understand what I’d been singing along to as a little girl, it was kind of unnerving.

What song can’t you abide and why?

The song by what’s-her-name, you know, that young girl who wears those low-cut shirts and high-cut skirts, you know, that girl. Or is it what’s-his-name? You know, that boy who sings like he means it? The one who sings each cheesy lyric like he really, really means it?

What is your favorite line from a song?

Otis Redding: “My life is such a weary thing.”

(And every single line in Tom Waits’s “The Part You Throw Away”)

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

WILL YOU MISS ME WHEN I’M GONE?: THE CARTER FAMILY AND THEIR LEGACY IN AMERICAN MUSIC by Mark Zwonitzer.
 
Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

Did you mean my favorite movie-themed music? Bruce Springsteen’s BORN TO RUN—cinematic.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Undoubtedly in the running: NAKED SONGS by Rickie Lee Jones.
 
Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

All of my less than semi-successful relationships have been interesting encounters with semi-famous musicians.
 
Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Smug writing; of which I provided an excellent example in my answer to question three.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Fainted.

CHRISTA SMITH ANDERSON

Why is music important to you?

It’s visceral. Ralph Stanley’s “The Roses Will Bloom” can get me through the hardest day. Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Educated Fool” [from THAT'S ALL] makes a case for religion like no sermon I’ll ever hear.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“Jolene” by Dolly Parton. The album came out the year I was born but it must’ve still been playing in heavy rotation by the time I was three or four years old. One of my parents probably had the album, too. So I was young, too young to get the song’s lyrics. But I knew drama when I heard it, and there’s something about the way the music of “Jolene” escalates that’s definitely dramatic. I couldn’t get enough of that song. Plus, I just loved Dolly Parton and watched her variety show whenever it was on TV.

What song can’t you abide and why?

“You’ve Never Been This Far Before” by Conway Twitty. I know lots of women swooned for Twitty in his day, but that song just screams perv to me.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“Free at last, they took your life, but they could not take your pride.”

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

There’s a short story I love that, in the end, is about the music of speech. It’s "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

MONSOON WEDDING.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

LUCKY SHOE by September 67.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

I can’t say because I don’t read “music writing” per se. If it’s good writing and it’s about music, I’ll read it, but I don’t seek it out.

BRIAN JAMES BARR

Why is music important to you?

For the same reason trees and rivers and mountains are important.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“Lord, I Hope This Day Is Good” by the Corbin/Hanner Band. Three years old.

What song can’t you abide and why?

Radiohead. Every song.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“Why do I keep fuckin’ up?”—Neil Young.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

SHAKEY: NEIL YOUNG’S BIOGRAPHY by Jimmy McDonough.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

COAL MINER’S DAUGHTER. Quoth Levon Helm: “He shore went to a lotta trouble to git on top of a pile a junk!”
 
Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Lou Reed’s GROWING UP IN PUBLIC. And any of Mark Lanegan’s solo albums.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I drank red wine and ate steak with Kim Thayil of Soundgarden. I’ve also shopped for fresh tilapia with Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse. My wife had Emmylou Harris hold open a restroom door for her in Nashville some years ago. Also, I once went through airport security with the great Iggy Pop. He removed his shoes and belt and wallet like the rest of us, but when he got through the line…he began doing tai chi stretches. The rest of us headed for Starbucks.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

“May be their best effort yet!”

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

At the Agora in Cleveland some years ago, I shouted out Bucky Baxter's name really loudly for no reason other than that I think he is amazing. He was playing pedal steel for Ryan Adams at the time and when he heard me yell his name he looked up excitedly and peered out into the crowd hoping to see someone he knew. But it was only me, and he looked away disappointedly.

CHARLIE BERTSCH

Why is music important to you?

Music is how I feel the world. Like many people with an intellectual bent, I have a tendency to retreat into my mind, even when what I need most is to participate with all the strength of my body. Songs pull me out of that self-made prison.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

My mother used to play me her old folk records from college when I was little. I was especially fond of the first Peter, Paul and Mary album. I loved all of the songs but remember one day, when I was about seven, suddenly sensing the sadness underneath the beauty of the record’s concluding track, “Where Have All The Flowers Gone.” I would play that one over and over, almost as a way of teaching myself to lament.

What song can’t you abide and why?

I think it’s often the music of our teenage years that we look back to with the greatest affection or animosity. For me that means that the 1980s are filled with both personal classics and the blackest of beasts. Since I had a great love for the Jefferson Airplane of the 1960s, their ill-advised attempt to return to pop stardom as Starship with “We Built This City” made me terribly depressed.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“Lies and betrayals/fruit-covered nails/electricity and lust” [from “Trigger Cut” by Pavement] because I’ve been singing it over and over, almost as a personal mantra.
 
Please name your favorite music-themed book.

I love Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, where each book in the series goes deep inside one album. My favorite from that collection is Carl Wilson’s book on Céline Dion’s LET’S TALK ABOUT LOVE: A JOURNEY TO THE END OF TASTE, which does as good a job of explaining the relationship between taste, class, and education as anything I’ve ever read.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

The story of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis told in CONTROL is beautifully presented. As a child of the post-punk era, I was in a hellish heaven when I saw it.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

I’m not sure whether “unsung” is equivalent to  “underrated” but I was listening to the album LOLITA NATION by the 1980s independent band Game Theory the other day and was pained to realize how completely they’ve been forgotten.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

My girlfriend was working at a San Francisco charity concert for the Seva Foundation. Her job was to get posters and other classic memorabilia signed for the silent auction her non-profit was getting ready to put on. I got to tag along with her as we hunted down a bevy of 1960s stalwarts. At one point backstage, a whole bunch of them started to sing together, spontaneously. And they weren’t rehearsing, since nothing like that happened on stage later. To hear David Crosby, Graham Nash, and members of The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane joining their voices in joyous harmony was an experience I’ll never forget.
 
Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

I hate it when an established artist releases a new record, has it deemed a return to form, then goes a few years, releases another new record, then has THAT one deemed a return to form as well. The necessity of positing a  “wilderness” through which the artist wandered before producing their latest work escapes me.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

I’ve chanted “Free Bird” far too often.

GREG BOTTOMS

Why is music important to you?

I grew up with music—AM radio in dad’s car and then my own veering tastes as a teen. And I listen to music almost constantly now. If it’s not on, I turn it on.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“Blinded By the Light” by Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. I saw them play it live on TV when I was about seven, I think.

What song can’t you abide and why?

The Wiggles’ theme song. I suffered through it for all three of my kids.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“Sanitation expert and a maintenance engineer/garbage man, a janitor, and you, my dear” from “Waitress in the Sky” by The Replacements.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

BUT BEAUTIFUL: A BOOK ABOUT JAZZ by Geoff Dyer.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

Two: GIMME SHELTER and SCHOOL OF ROCK.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Chickasaw Mudd Puppies’ 8 TRACK STOMP.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails slapped me five as I was rocking out in front of the stage at an all-ages show in Virginia Beach back in ’90 or ’91.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

I’ve seen “charging guitar” in writing more than a few times. I always think, “Huh?”

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Passed out cold, fell over like cut tree. Came to with a big bearded guy saying, “Are you okay, dude?”

WILLIAM BOWERS

Why is music important to you?
 
At this point, I might just be insisting that I haven’t misspent twenty-plus years over-considering it.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

I was a toddler. It was a yellow 45 about the origin of the sandwich.

What song can’t you abide and why?
 
“Fly Away” by Lenny Kravitz. The worst, worst, worst of the ’90s-angst-cum-corporate-crowdpleaser anthems. A vapid, overproduced string of “Oohs” and “Yeahs.” If Kravitz has “got to get away,” why won’t he just go away?

What is your favorite line from a song?
 
Right now: “Too much cheesecake too soon.” (“Editions of You,” Roxy Music)

Please name your favorite music-themed book.
 
LOST JOY by Camden Joy, but I just got Tim Lawrence’s HOLD ON TO YOUR DREAMS: ARTHUR RUSSELL AND THE DOWNTOWN MUSIC SCENE, 1973–1992, which might surpass it.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.
 
CHASE THE DEVIL: RELIGIOUS MUSIC OF THE APPALACHIANS.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

“Of all time” drives me crazy. But, recently: either the first Throwing Muses [self-titled], or Dogbowl’s FLAN.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

My team lost an Asian American Alliance scavenger hunt at Oberlin College because another team kidnapped zydeco legend Terrance Simien, who was performing on campus that night, and was the object worth the most points. He bumped into me emerging from the van.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.
 
“Pure” before an abstraction.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?
 
The ladies of Bonde do Rolê were getting front-row patrons to express their horniness as part of a fun “Booty” rave-up. Most folks, when prompted, slurred a variation on “I want to tag that vag,” or some such, to the beat, while one of the women gyrated. Laura Taylor put the mic before me and I said, over the sound system, “This seems disrespectful.” She looked at me like I was a lost, farting robot. Seemed to bring the party down for a second. 

GREG ALAN BROWNDERVILLE

Why is music important to you?
 
Big question. At the risk of sounding grandiose, I’ll try to answer it seriously. Percy Bysshe Shelley said of poetry that “It purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.” Music does that, too. The thousand distractions of a normal day conspire to numb us to the sheer exhilaration of being alive, but music brings the feeling back.
 
Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.
 
I think it was “Strawberry Fields Forever” by The Beatles. I was probably six or so. I love the way those first notes of “Strawberry Fields Forever” sound red and squishy. My dad had all The Beatles’ albums on reel-to-reel, and I would sit and listen to them through headphones.
 
What song can’t you abide and why?
 
“Wheel in the Sky” by Journey makes me want to bulldoze some jam boxes. That vocal track is an aural rights atrocity.
 
What is your favorite line from a song?

Ask me tomorrow and get a different answer, but right this second it’s a tossup between the last two lines of this verse from Leonard Cohen’s “The Stranger Song”: “And while he talks his dreams to sleep/you notice there’s a highway/that is curling up like smoke above his shoulders/it’s curling just like smoke above his shoulders.”

Please name your favorite music-themed book.
 
Again, this could change at any time, but today it’s LEADBELLY by Tyehimba Jess.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

The Robert Petway recordings.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

One night in Memphis I ended up hanging out with Blind Mississippi Morris, a very amiable guy, and he asked me what brand of harmonica I liked to play. I said, “Lee Oskar’s the best I’ve found so far.” He said, “Naw, naw, son. You need you some Hohner Golden Melodies. Trust me—lot better tone.” I got a Hohner Golden Melody the next day, and I’ve been playing Hohner Golden Melodies ever since.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

The word “authentic” is overused. I’m not sure it should be used at all. What does it even mean, really? It’s one of those words writers use when they don’t want to do the hard work of sussing out—and then articulating—what delights them in certain music. I’m always thinking, “Authentically what?”
 
Also: the suffix “-esque.”

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?
 
One time I was playing a gig and my bandmates insisted on playing “Low Rider,” another song I absolutely despise (I would be in favor of rounding up all the iPods in the world with “Low Rider” on them and shooting iPod skeet). Anyway, I decided to make a mockery of the song: When it came time for me to take a harmonica solo, I intentionally played in the wrong key and strewed the sonic equivalent of pink silly string all over the rhythm section. My bandmates were embarrassed. I felt good about it.

ROD BRYAN

Why is music important to you?

Music can change the atmosphere of any situation. You could never listen to King Tubby at a boxing match. They’d quit fighting and shake hands.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“Joy to the World” by Three Dog Night. I thought it was called “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog.” I mostly sang the guitar riff. Duh Dunt Duh! I was maybe three or four?

What song can’t you abide and why?

“Hey There Lonely Girl” by Eddie Holman. I used to work at a coffee shop that had digital radio and it came on way too often. I would run screaming to change the station when it came on. I felt like I was on THE TRUMAN SHOW.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“They say the trick is to walk in backwards like you’re walking out, I guess the Lord’s wearing glasses now…” from Pete Townshend and Ronnie Lane’s “Keep Me Turning”—in reference to trying to get into heaven.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

DEEP BLUES by Robert Palmer.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

THE REAL BUDDY HOLLY STORY.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

TUNNEL OF LOVE by Bruce Springsteen.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I met Elvis Costello on the street in London in 1995. He was listening to the first Son Volt album on his headphones. I asked him what he thought of Wilco. He said, “They just want to be The Replacements, don’t they?”

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Ivy leaguers writing about Ivy leaguers.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

I once knocked myself out by jumping up and hitting a low ceiling on the edge of a stage in Fayetteville.

WILL CLARKE

Why is music important to you?

Music can change my mood instantly. It’s the most immediate source of inspiration and insight that I have. I’ve learned more as a novelist from Sufjan Stevens and Mark Kozelek than I have from any other contemporary writers or poets.
 
Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

Michael Martin Murphey’s “Wildfire.” I remember being in the back of my mom’s station wagon, listening to the song and worrying about that girl in the blizzard and that pony she called Wildfire. I was maybe three or four.

What song can’t you abide and why?

“Poker Face.” It ruined 2009 for me.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“She’s a jar/with a heavy lid/my pop quiz kid/a sleepy kisser/a pretty war/with feelings hid/she begs me not to miss her” —Wilco.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

SO YOU WANNA BE A ROCK STAR by the drummer of Semisonic, Jacob Stitcher.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Tripping Daisy’s JESUS HITS LIKE THE ATOM BOMB.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I was a stagehand at LSU’s Pete Maravich Center in 1989. The highlight was when I worked the R.E.M. show during their Green Tour that fall. I unloaded tons of stage and speakers from trucks starting at around 4 A.M.; there Boycott Tuna Save The Dolphins stickers plastered all over the band’s equipment. By the number of blue dolphin-shaped stickers, it was clear that R.E.M. was hardcore about this issue.

Later that day, I sat down to eat with the roadies and the rest of the crew while Stipe and the boys slept on the buses. The food services people obviously hadn’t gotten the dolphin-shaped memo: All the stage grunts were greeted with a big, horrible bowl of mayonaise-y tuna salad and white bread slices for lunch.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Describing the food in rock star’s contracts or how down to earth, and even solicitous rock stars are in person.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

After two days of my ears ringing and feeling clogged from a Raconteurs show, I now put cotton balls in my ears at all concerts. At thirty-nine, a very uncool hearing loss is a reality.

JOHN CLINE

Why is music important to you?

It’s a whole way of thinking...as an academic, hearing culture is often more rewarding than reading about it.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

I was pretty into “Beat It” off the THRILLER album. I was three when that came out.

What song can’t you abide and why?

Anything by Elton John. It all sounds like bad Broadway revue versions of actual rock & roll.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“I want to tell her that I love her but that point is probably moot,” Rick Springfield, “Jesse’s Girl.”

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

I’ve reread PSYCHOTIC REACTIONS AND CARBURETOR DUNG [Lester Bangs] many, many times.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

It’s a toss-up between SPACE IS THE PLACE and THE HARDER THEY COME.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Wow, overrated is so much easier. I think Yoko Ono’s early albums, the Plastic Ono Band stuff...that’s really underrated. Especially FLY.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I met Jerry Harrison in Charlottesville when he was helping to remaster the Talking Heads albums. The people at my table were a bit unnerved while I ranted about the “Roadrunner” keyboard line as I got up the nerve to talk to him. He was very polite and signed my cocktail napkin.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

The algebraic style formula...everybody does it, and it’s hard not to: Band X + Band Y = Band Z.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

A girl once drug me to a Jack Johnson concert. Just being there was embarrassing enough.

ALEX V. COOK

Why is music important to you?

It’s the grease that keeps the wheels of humanity rolling. I am suspicious of people that putter around all day in silence; I think they are automata, agents of a greater sinister clockwork that will one day take over when then gears of intellectual longing grind to a halt, and only the purposed exploration of music by those out of phase with the rhythms of that machine will stave off this endgame. So yeah, music is important to me.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

The disco version of the STAR WARS theme by Meco. I remember my mom calling the radio station to request the STAR WARS theme in honor of my ninth birthday, and that was what they played. It was the height of STAR WARS mania; the movie had been in theaters for ten months now, but my dad was staging some stalemate against popular culture and refused to take me to see it, so I had to play along like I knew what everyone else at school was talking about all that time. Kids at school said they heard my name on the radio that morning, and the shame of being a total social misfit was delayed for a while longer. I still use music in pretty much the same manner.

What song can’t you abide and why?

I used to think “Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan was the epitome of what I didn’t like about popular music—the attitude, the shrink-wrapped production, everything about it was horrible, and I expressed such sentiment once when it came on in a bar. Things got quiet. My friends glared back with disgust, “You don’t like Steely Dan?” A drunken burnout sitting at the bar overheard this heresy and was ready to take me outside over it. I realized that everybody I knew liked Steely Dan, even the most incalcitrant punk rockers in my circle, so I spent a week listening to nothing but Steely Dan, trying to find out if the problem was me or them. Turns out it was neither and now there are a lot of things I can latch onto in the plastic world of the Dan. There started to be a book in this, but Carl Wilson beat me to it with his treatment of Céline Dion.

What is your favorite line from a song?

When asked by his woman why he plays fiddle so well in “Devil’s Elbow,” Doug Kershaw expresses the futility of posing such a question by countering “Go ask the eagle why it flies and why God sometimes paints its skies with rainbows!” No wonder a Doug Kershaw song was the first tune beamed back to Earth from outer space (“Louisiana Man” by the Apollo 12 mission); with a line like that, it is wholly believable they encountered Doug Kershaw sawing away on his instrument at the edge of their landing site.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

I have two. THE REST IS NOISE by Alex Ross, a history of twentieth-century classical music, is the gold standard of music writing, a staggering piece of scholarship, analysis, and love of his subject; and PSYCHOTIC REACTION AND CARBURETOR DUNG, the posthumous collection of Lester Bangs music columns, presents its author leaping past the dull paradigm of record reviews and concert recaps and band biographies to stick his finger in the socket of rock & roll just to show you can read the truth in the burn marks.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

There are so many great movies about music—ALMOST FAMOUS and SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN are but two great ones—because music like that makes a movie happen, but the ones I really love let music do its thing and interweave imagery into the songs. HOT PEPPER, Les Blank’s poetic portrait of Clifton Chenier and the Philip Glass music in Geoffrey Reggio’s KOYAANISQATSI are among the finest examples of this. That and any video footage of a room full of women line dancing to Clarence Carter’s “Strokin’.”

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Ramsay Midwood’s SHOOTOUT AT THE OK CHINESE RESTAURANT is so unknown it might not even qualify as being underrated, but it is just the best record. It is a clandestine meeting of alt-country, hippie jangle and the ghost of Alan Lomax in the most remote holler in the Ozarks, except the guy who called the meeting never shows up and the rest are left to find something to talk about. It is WAITING FOR GODOT on the last of the moonshine.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I interviewed composer John Cage on Valentine’s Day 1992, just a few months before he died, for my college radio station. I picked him up in my car and was dumbstruck to find the station was simulcasting a volleyball game during the time slot. I was livid! Here was in my opinion the most important thinker in modern music on hand, and we were broadcasting volleyball? Mr. Cage was, true to zen form, unmoved and during the taping happily answered my naive questions and then told a story about walking through a park in Manhattan with Morton Feldman just as a ladder truck laden with firemen with all the lights going but no siren was trying to push its way through a traffic jam. It was moving so slowly that he and Feldman followed it on foot for a couple of blocks until it disappeared down an alley, presumably where the fire was. Mr. Cage looked up and smiled:  “It was a quiet fire engine.”

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Thinking musicians have the answers. If artists in any medium had the answers, would they be wasting their time mediating this important truth through art? They’d deliver it from mountaintops like The Prophets. The answers are not in their backstories or in interviews or any of those places. Most of the time, musicians are not really aware they are asking the questions. They are just singing whatever words and playing whatever notes their abilities at that time allow. As music writers, our job is to tease out those questions and point the reader toward some sort of answer, but really, if we had the answers, would we bother with music writing?

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

There used to be a guy in the French Quarter who sold cassette bootlegs of concerts and hard-to-find new-wave albums; we cut our teeth on the stuff from him. At an R.E.M. show at the Saenger, this cute girl sitting near us had a tape recorder and said she didn’t know much about R.E.M. but liked that “Superman” song. Some guy bought her a ticket and was paying her to tape the show. She kept leaving her seat, so we took turns singing “Superman” into her tape recorder. Years later at LSU, I told a guy in my dorm making his first trip to New Orleans he should go see the bootleg guy. A week later he showed up at my door pissed, “I paid fifteen dollars for this R.E.M. bootleg from your guy down there, and the whole thing is just some asshole going ‘I am supermaaaaaan’ through every song!”

LARRY DONN

Why is music important to you?  

I make money doing it.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were. 

“You’ll Never Walk Alone” by Howard Keel. I was about eight or nine.

What song can’t you abide and why? 

Anything I didn’t write or play on.

What is your favorite line from a song?

Hard to say. Probably one of Chuck Berry’s songs. There are so many good lines.

Please name your favorite music-themed book. 

My show songlist, I suppose.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie. 

KING CREOLE.

Please name the most underrated album of all time. 

My latest, BURNING!

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician. 

There have been many. I have played many shows with famous musicians. Possibly two of the most famous were Dino Danelli, later drummer for The Rascals, and Sammy Creason, who played with the Bill Black Combo on The Beatles’ first tour of America, then with Jimmy Buffett, and many more, including eighteen years with Kris Kristofferson, and at least a couple with Jerry Lee Lewis. Dino was the drummer when I was playing with Bobby Brown and the Curios in ’65, and Sammy started playing with my band in ’58, when he was still in high school.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing. 

I don’t put annoying clichés in my songs, and I don’t listen to other people’s songs if they have annoying clichés. I can’t even think of any annoying clichés.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

None. I don’t get embarrassed by what I do onstage. If my pants fell down, I wouldn’t be embarrassed. I would either pull them up or take them off and go on with the show.

KIM COOPER

Why is music important to you?

I’m kind of hooked on the immediate shift in brain waves that happens when I hear something I love.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

I must have been two or three when I became obsessed with “Ruby Tuesday” by The Rolling Stones, because there’s this little moment at the beginning where Mick Jagger sounds like he’s stifling a burp. I had a vague understanding that recorded music always sounded the same, while my dad’s singing and playing always sounded different, and waiting for that almost-burp to come around cemented this realization.

What song can’t you abide and why?

I can’t tell you, it would give my enemies too much power.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“Two soldiers fighting in a trench/one soldier glances up to see the sun/and dreams of games he played when he was young” —The Kinks, “Some Mother’s Son.”

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

I’M WITH THE BAND: CONFESSIONS OF A GROUPIE by Pamela Des Barres.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

LOLITA NATION by Game Theory.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

Paul Westerberg sat down across from me in a club before a Replacements show, as I was writing a letter to my boyfriend, who was my boyfriend in part because he had had his heart broken by Paul’s wife and decided to leave the Midwest. So I passed the letter across the table with a written request that Paul say hi, and he did.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Threads of gazillions of interchangeable adjectives meant to describe what something sounds like, which always rings in my head like tin cans full of lentils rolling down a staircase.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Drunkenly rushed the back stage at a Violent Femmes show in northern England, because I was sixteen and homesick for America and suddenly desperately wanted to say hi to someone who wasn’t a surly Brit. They were really, really nice about it, which made me suddenly sober and mortified.

MATTHEW DUERSTEN

Why is music important to you?
 
No idea. Next question.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.
 
“Hot Head” by Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band, performed on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE on November 22, 1980. The first time I realized Casey Kasem was lying to me. Also: My father was dying in a hospital bed five feet away.

What song can’t you abide and why?
 
“Ballroom Blitz” by Sweet. Shrill, annoying, lily-white and—like me—terminally unhip.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“Well I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars,/but I hate them worse than lepers/and I’ll kill them in their cars.” —Neil Young, “Revolution Blues.”

Please name your favorite music-themed book.
 
PLEASE KILL ME by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain.
 
Please name your favorite music-themed movie.
 
Two-way tie: COCKSUCKER BLUES and THE LAST WALTZ.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.
 
Brian Setzer’s THE KNIFE FEELS LIKE JUSTICE (a forgotten blueprint for alt-country).
 
Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.
 
Spilling a martini on “Weird Al” Yankovic.
 
Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.
 
The vogue of “oral histories” that began appearing after PLEASE KILL ME.

SAM EIFLING

Why is music important to you?

It is my sunshine, my only sunshine.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“Tubby the Tuba,” from age four. It’s still one of the most affecting melodies I know.

What song can’t you abide and why?

“Margaritaville,” by Jimmy Buffett. Heard it slurred too many times at too many Florida dive bars by too many people who came to that hellhole of a state to live those lyrics.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“It’s better to be lonely/than to be miserable both night and day.” From John Lee Hooker’s “Tired of Being Your Doggie.” Wish it didn’t ring so true.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

GÖDEL, ESCHER, BACH: AN ETERNAL GOLDEN BRAID by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Rock!
 
Please name your favorite music-themed movie.
 
24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE may not be my favorite, but it’s worth plugging.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

How about Bonobo’s ANIMAL MAGIC? Wonderfully chill, percussion-heavy downtempo.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

Langerado, South Florida, 2006. Watching the Flaming Lips set, up sidles the semi-reclusive Sabina Sciubba, frontwoman of the Brazilian Girls. She shoots some video of the Lips, takes a puff off a pipe passing through. Then some twit steps forward and breaks the spell, telling her, I really enjoyed your set, or I’m a big fan, or some such. Sciubba nods thanks. And within half a minute, exposed, she evaporates.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Describing a guitar/horn/voice/rhythm as “Southern-Fried.”

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

A !!! show at the Rev Room, Little Rock, 2007. Beer-certain that a friend of mine is sitting at a table, I slink up behind the stranger talking to her and pretend to lick the side of his face, from neck to temple. As I turn my head, tongue jutting out, I see that in fact the young woman at the table is someone I’ve never seen before. All I can do is come clean: I was trying to goof for my friend, which you, ma’am, are not. I am an idiot. They turn out to be quite sweet. He’s one of my most trustworthy friends now.

NATALIE ELLIOTT 

Why is music important to you?

It's a mood-maker. I'm very into music as a soundtrack. I like to pretend real life is more cinematic than it actually is.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

I rendered THE DRIFTERS’ GOLDEN HITS unlistenable on my Fisher-Price record player. I still know every single word to every song on that comp.

What song can’t you abide and why?

Most recently, it would be “Best I Ever Had” by Drake. I don't care if he was on DEGRASSI.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“A troughful of hearts could only be a bore.” From “Lush Life” (Strayhorn).

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

I haven’t read enough music-themed books to confidently answer this question, somehow.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

X: THE UNHEARD MUSIC. Or PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE. Does KOYAANISQATSI count?

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

I don’t think I have the authority to deem things “underrated.” Lately I’ve been turned onto the glory of Jobriath’s CREATURES OF THE STREET.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I once stole John Doe’s cellphone number from a roadie, and proceeded to send him many text messages (lame). He commanded me to never contact him again. I was in college. It was sad. 

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

I don’t want to hear about anyone’s breakup, ever again.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Once, as an undergrad, I beer-assaulted a girl I didn't like. I'm still sorry about it.

BETH ANN FENNELLY

Why is music important to you?

Because listening to music puts us back in synch with the always-rhythmic natural world.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“9 to 5” by Dolly Parton from the 1980 film, 9 TO 5: I was nine years old.

What song can’t you abide and why?

“Feliz Navidad,” because one year at Christmas my husband got it stuck in his head and couldn’t stop humming it, which got it stuck in my head; just a note or two could set one of us off for hours, which would set the other off. The melody is insidious and infectious and knowing it’s out there is the only thing that makes me dread Christmas.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“I’m all lost in the supermarket/I can no longer shop happily/I came in here for that special offer/a guaranteed personality.” —The Clash, “Lost In The Supermarket.”

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

HIGH FIDELITY by Nick Hornby (well, anything by Nick Hornby).

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

FAME—it made me want to change my name to Coco and go to an arts academy.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Too many to list—some are: Liz Phair, EXILE IN GUYVILLE; Buffalo Tom, LET ME COME OVER; PJ Harvey, RID OF ME.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I shook hands with Olivia Newton-John. But my husband met Meat Loaf and Bun E. Carlos at a Cheap Trick concert in L.A.; that wins I think.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

When a writer can’t figure out what a musician sounds like, they say, “If X (famous musician) and Y (famous musician) got together and had a baby, it would sound like Z.” It seems a tired way to make a comparison.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Danced onstage.

ALISON FENSTERSTOCK

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

I think the first one was “Thriller.” I loved the video because it seemed similar to shows I was used to watching, like THE MUPPET SHOW. (I was six.) But the first song that really infected me was Ronnie Spector’s “Be My Baby.” I was ten and wanted to see the movie DIRTY DANCING. As I remember, my dad went and saw it first to make sure it was okay, and then took me. During that slow-motion, black-and-white opening sequence, I heard that first Phil Spector “Boom Ba-Boom” and then Ronnie’s voice... I was hooked and sort of ruined for ’80s music. Twenty years later I got to interview her and tell her that. Also, I am grateful to my dad for sitting through DIRTY DANCING twice.

What is your favorite line from a song?

It’s hard to think of a favorite—there are so many different favorites—but one I always love is “I won’t stop tryin’ ’til I create a disturbance in your mind,” the refrain from Jessie Hill’s “Ooh Poo Pah Doo.” I mean, what is that about? A disturbance in your mind? It was 1961 in Louisiana, not 1967 on Haight-Ashbury or something. I love wondering what he meant when he wrote that.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

That’s a really hard one. I love Peter Guralnick’s work because his books have an incredibly dense amount of information, but they make you feel like you’re reading a novel. They just whip right by. I also have a soft spot for groupie memoirs, like Pamela Des Barres’s first two books. She captures the wild energy of being a fan so well.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

I’ll pretty much watch any rock-themed movie dealing with the ’50s,’60s, or ’70s no matter how inaccurate or badly acted (ahem, GREAT BALLS OF FIRE!, ahem, CADILLAC RECORDS.) I also love LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS, which is more of a great subversive feminist movie, at least in part, than a great rock movie.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I got to interview Elvis Costello on the phone and say, “Hi, this is Alison.” He didn’t really get it. I also rode in the back of a cab with Willie Hall, the Memphis drummer, when he was really hungover. There were four people jammed in there and I was pressed up against him, and I was positive he was going to throw up on me.

ARTHUR FLOWERS

Why is music important to you?

I hear my work as music, I write it as music, I can tell when it's a blues band, a jazz solo, or a full orchestra, I can hear when it is tinny and out of tune. As a practitioner of the oral tradition in African-American lit, music is my literary aesthetic.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

I wouldn’t say it's the first, but the album that probably moved me most when I heard is WHAT’S GOING ON by Marvin Gaye, had just got back from Vietnam, blasted out of my head, and felt like it was written just for me, it blew me away and still does.

What song can’t you abide and why?

If I can’t abide it, I don’t want to think about it.

What is your favorite line from a song?

From “Freedom Means” by The Dells: “We’re the children of the sun and we’re heading home again/there’s a long journey ahead, we might as well begin.”

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

ANOTHER GOOD LOVING BLUES [by Arthur Flowers].

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

Was sitting in a nightclub on Beale when I realized the man sitting next to me was Albert King, we talked, or rather I gushed, he agreed to do a blurb for my first novel, a couple of days later, I heard he died.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Nothing, not my style.

BILL FRISKICS-WARREN

Why is music important to you?

At the risk of sounding an “aw shucks” or pious note, it feeds my spirit. Always has. I’m not sure what I’d do if I lost my hearing. to

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

The Allman Brothers’ version of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “One Way Out” from EAT A PEACH. The album hadn’t been out long. I was ten or so. I’d obsessed on records before this, everything from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “Cry Like a Baby,” but the Allmans’ “One Way Out”—a live recording that was left off FILLMORE EAST, I believe—was so elemental and foreboding. It both frightened and enthralled me. Hearing the recordings of Robert Johnson—and, later, Skip James, Charley Patton and other Delta blues singers— mesmerized me in much the same way. The Allmans’ version of “One Way Out”—that, and their cover of Muddy Waters’ “Trouble No More” (also from EAT A PEACH)—probably did more to get me hooked on the blues than anything else.

What song can’t you abide and why?

I tend to be more of an enthusiast than a naysayer when it comes to music. I certainly have little use for concepts like guilty pleasure or good schlock. “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” is a great record, period. Ditto Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual” or Hanson’s “Mmmbop.” That said, Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” is pretty hard to take, bereft as it is of the intimacy, empathy and understatement of Dolly’s breathtaking original.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“You can bomb the world to pieces but you can’t bomb it into peace, ” from “Bomb The World” by Spearhead. First runner-up: “A wop bop a lu bop, a lop bam boom!”

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

Ishmael Reed’s MUMBO JUMBO. The novel’s topsy-like “Jes Grew” virus is an unforgettable personification of jazz—of pretty much every form of African American musical vernacular, for that matter. More traditional runner-up: Craig Werner’s A CHANGE IS GONNA COME: MUSIC, RACE & THE SOUL OF AMERICA.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

It’s not a music-themed movie per se, but I’d have to go with Robert Altman’s MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER. The way that Leonard Cohen’s songs function in Altman’s anti-Western is so evocative that it sometimes feels like the movie is a series of videos for Cohen’s music. The recordings so completely inform the action that, on some level, the movie becomes a meditation on the transformative power of music. 

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Jim Ford’s HARLAN COUNTY, the lost country-soul classic from 1969.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I had the privilege of spending a couple of hours with June Carter and Johnny Cash at the Carter Family Fold in Southwestern Virginia in September of 2002. They were out at June’s parents’ old house working on what proved to her final solo album. A year later, both of them were gone.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Anything that includes a modifier with the suffix “-esque” behind it. One possible exception is the coinage Dylanesque, which sounds as monolithic as the music to which it alludes.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Not clapping, singing, or moving my body to the music when I felt the urge to do so.

SHEILA HETI

Why is music important to you?

I’m not sure that it is.
 
Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

Some Raffi song as a child. The one about where the watermelons grow.
 
What song can’t you abide and why?

“The Star-Spangled Banner.” Because I’m Canadian. It gives me the chills.
 
What is your favorite line from a song?

“We are the kids in America.”
 
Please name your favorite music-themed book.

LET’S TALK ABOUT LOVE by Carl Wilson.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

32 SHORT FILMS about Glen Gould.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Khia’s MY NECK, MY BACK (dirty version).

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I was on tour with The Hidden Cameras and I met Lily Allen backstage. We were playing the same gig in Spain. She was so insufferable and vacuous with vanity and narcissism I couldn’t even stay in the trailer with her and the rest of them out of sociological curiosity. She just took the joint and kept it. Didn’t pass it around.
 
Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Just when you can hear that crazy excitement about being the first (or among the first) to discover someone new.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Left at 10:30.

SKIP HORACK

Why is music important to you?

Because I’m such a mesmerizing dancer, I suppose.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

As five or six year old, I was a sucker for Waylon Jennings’s “Good Ol’ Boys” (which was THE DUKES OF HAZZARD theme song, of course). Still am.

What song can’t you abide and why?

“Who Let the Dogs Out?” by Baha Men. Why? If you happened to attend the 2000 FSU-Miami game in the Orange Bowl, you wouldn’t have to ask. Clearly, it was Satan who let the dogs out.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison”—from “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” by David Allan Coe.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

RESERVATION BLUES by Sherman Alexie.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

How exciting! A tie! THE COMMITMENTS and THIS IS SPINAL TAP.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

MIGHTY JOE MOON by Grant Lee Buffalo (okay, not of all time—but check out “Mockingbirds” on YouTube).

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

MC Hammer waiting for a flight in the Houston airport back in ’92 or so, accompanied by some guy with a boom box playing “Too Legit to Quit” and whatnot on a steady loop (though at a reasonable and considerate volume, which made it all the more funny for some reason). You just don’t get to see things like that at airports anymore.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

“But behind the scenes, things were falling apart…” (Or maybe it’s the musicians who are cliché?)

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Pink Floyd in the Superdome, 1994. Hijinks ensued. We’ll leave it at that.

DEREK JENKINS

Why is music important to you?

Because you need it to dance.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

I played the hell out of a Disney 45 with “Bare Necessities” on Side A and “I Wanna Be Like You” on Side B. That explains a lot, really....

What song can’t you abide and why?

“Baby’s Got Her Blue Jeans On.” Most insidious earbug ever. Deployable as a weapon.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“They say someday soon we will all stand as brothers. Until then, I guess we’ll just stand around”—from “Bhagavan Decreed” by the Flatlanders.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

THE TUNING OF THE WORLD by R. Murray Schafer.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

THE CHRONICLE OF ANA MAGDALENA BACH, directed by Straub-Huillet. It reenacts some major performances in the life of Bach, as described by his second wife, and it opens with a guy absolutely shredding a selection of the Brandenberg concertos on a clavier. I’m generally no fan of reenactment in documentary, but an aspect of musical performance heightens the effect of such scenes and gets to a more slippery kind of experiential truth behind the facts of a moment. It’s not quite “acting,” but a similar form of mediumship is taking place, with the musician channeling the composer on two registers at once. Documentarists are always talking about “SPONTANEITY.” What can be more breathtakingly spontaneous than musical performance?

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

UGK, RIDIN’ DIRTY. Gangsta rap as dread, anger, desperation, and regret. Not only one of the great rap albums.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

Most times, I try to avoid random contact with people I admire.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

I really don’t care about how often people use a lazy word, but one thing does drive me crazy in contemporary music writing: A lot of critics are incapable of conducting a decent interview. It’s a lost art. This inability might have something to do with a lack of humility or a simple social awkwardness (the two faults are often one and the same). A good interview is the hardest thing in the world to pull off, but it’s much more valuable than any amount of interpretive wankery.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Last week I confused Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” with David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly.” Turns out Puccini’s opera was far less subversive.

ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN

Why is music important to you?

It's the soundtrack to my life and to history in general. Very often it’s better than both. When I’m down, I’d much rather hear a favorite song than have a drink.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

Stevie Wonder’s “Ma Cherie Amour.” I was six. I heard it at a backyard birthday party and learned to do the cha-cha to it. To this day it brings back those powerful original feelings of happiness and possibility whenever I hear it.

What song can’t you abide and why?

Lots of candidates here, but “Muskrat Love” by Captain & Tennille gets under my skin. Even for light pop, it’s ridiculous.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“WOP BOP A LOO BOP, A WOP BAM BOO” (Tutti Frutti).

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

TUNES FOR A SMALL HARMONICA, a teen novel about music lessons and unrequited love. I used to read it over and over.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

Michael Jackson’s THIS IS IT. Really a wonder to see MJ at fifty inhabit the songs that made him an international star at twenty-five. 

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Anything by the band The Negro Problem, up to and including the solo projects by lead singer Stew.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I interviewed Randy Newman at his house on 9/11. We just happened to have picked that date. We wound up watching coverage on TV for an hour before we talked about music. His reaction to that whole day proved to be a great intro to him as a person and philosopher.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Assertions that an artist’s music is “maturing” or becoming more “accessible.” Maybe he or she was just having an off day or an inspired moment. Sometimes context is overrated.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

I fell asleep in the third row of a David Bowie concert. This was during his “SERIOUS MOONLIGHT” tour in the ’80s. It was very loud, but I was tired. Tough day at the office.

ROY KASTEN

Why is music important to you?

Music, at its best, makes me feel young, consoled, inspired, humbled, and high.
 
Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“Jet” by Paul McCartney and Wings. I was probably nine years old and would leap off of couches whenever the chorus came around.

What song can’t you abide and why?

“Do You Think I’m Sexy?” by Rod Stewart. An obvious choice, but the betrayal never ceases to infuriate.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“Money doesn’t talk, it swears.” Bob Dylan sang that.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

Too many to name, but currently that’s easy: MEETING JIMMIE RODGERS: HOW AMERICA’S ORIGINAL ROOTS MUSIC HERO CHANGED THE POP SOUNDS OF A CENTURY by Barry Mazor.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

Gus Van Sant’s LAST DAYS.
 
Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Willie Nelson’s FACE OF A FIGHTER.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I met Townes Van Zandt a year or so before he died. It was in the green room after a show in Chicago. We chatted a bit and at the end he grabbed my hand, looked me dead in the eyes, and said, “Things are gonna get a lot worse. But you’re gonna be all right. You’ve got good eyes.”

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Any description of music as being a “stew.”
 
What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?
 
Recently, I bought a round of shots for Philadelphia band Marah, only to have lead singer Dave Bielanko, who I had forgotten had just quit drinking, succumb to temptation, take a sip, and then spit the whiskey out over the stage.

STEVE KLINGE

Why is music important to you?

That’s too tough to be witty about.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

The Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” at age six.

What song can’t you abide and why?

Anything by Rush, because of Geddy Lee’s voice.

What is your favorite line from a song?

(I WISH I COULD SEARCH FOR A MORE PERFECT CHOICE):
“The book of love has music in it
In fact that’s where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb”
 —The Magnetic Fields’ “The Book of Love.”

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

Perhaps it’s too obvious of a choice, but Nick Hornby’s HIGH FIDELITY.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

DON’T LOOK BACK.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Mary Margaret O’Hara’s MISS AMERICA.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

I’m afraid to name anything because I have probably been guilty of using it.

STEPHEN KOCH

Why is music important to you?
 
Music is the universal language.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.
 
“Beans & Cornbread” by Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, eleven months.

What song can’t you abide and why?
 
All songs can be abided.

 What is your favorite line from a song?
 
“Mmmmm mmm hhhhh-mmm mmmmm” from “Dark Was the Night-Cold Was the Ground,” by Blind Willie Johnson.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.
 
The “5” Royales —DEDICATED TO YOU/MUDBOY and The Neutrons—KNOWN FELONS IN DRAG.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.
 
Ronnie Hawkins had told me the music The Band was doing was the music he was trying to get them to play at the end of their time with The Hawks—funky country rock. I’d never heard that one before, and wanted to mention it to Levon Helm and was planning to see him in New York. Then, in the kitchen after Levon’s Midnight Ramble, I ate a pepper from a selection given to Levon from one of his neighbors. I became so overcome by the pepper’s high Scoville value, my tongue couldn’t form such a complex sentence.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.
 
All of them.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Once, at a Steve Perry concert at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall, I attended. (Please understand, I was doing a concert review.)

 JOE R. LANSDALE

Why is music important to you?

It gives me a soundtrack to my life.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog,” sung by Elvis Presley. I was somewhere between three and four. It was something a kid could remember and latch onto. I actually now like the Big Mama Thorton version best.

What song can’t you abide and why?

I hate anything by Barry Manilow. Because they suck.

What is your favorite line from a song?

Any line in the song “As Time Goes By.”

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

EDDY AND THE CRUISERS.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE or LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

TIME PEACE by The Rascals.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

Was interested to find out that Jim Lauderdale also did martial arts. In his case Tai Chi, in my case, Shen Chuan. Jim is a fascinating person. Know him through my dauther, Kasey Lansdale, who is a country singer. Met him once for coffee with Kasey and we talked martial arts.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Anything can be annoying, and anything can sound fresh, depending on the writer and the context.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

I haven’t done anything embarrassing, besides attending a play with music by Barry Manilow. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but talk about tapioca music.

ALLEN LOWE

Why is music important to you? 

Because I live in a place (Maine) that is culturally empty and that regards me as a non-entity.  Music is virtually the only thing I care about anymore (aside from politics and my family)
 
Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were. 

“There’s No Business Like Show Business,” as performed by Sonny Rollins.  I was fourteen (it was 1968; the record was made in 1956).
 
What song can’t you abide and why? 

Anything George Bush or Jimmy Carter listened to (they are the worst presidents in my lifetime).
 
What is your favorite line from a song?

“I want a hot dog for my roll” (song of same title, Butterbeans and Susie).
 
Please name your favorite music-themed book.

The autobiography of Marianne Faithful.
 
Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME (THE RUTH ETTING STORY).
 
Please name the most underrated album of all time. 

My last CD.
 
Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician. 

I drove Art Pepper around to buy drugs in Boston, circa 1975.
 
Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

“This is the blues.”
 
What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert? 

I can’t think of anything—sorry. Will try to embarrass myself soon.

MICHAELANGELO MATOS

Why is music important to you?

Having devoted pretty much my entire life to it, I’m embarrassed that I can’t really say why.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

Donna Summer, “Last Dance.” I was three.

What song can’t you abide and why?

Remember that song “Dear Mr. Jesus”? It’s like a black hole.

What is your favorite line from a song?

Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl”: “That girl thinks she’s the queen of the neighborhood/I’ve got news for you/SHE IS.”

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

Simon Reynolds’s GENERATION ECSTASY.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

SOUL POWER, a recent documentary about the concert before the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire, 1974. James Brown is about the sixth best thing in it, if that gives you any idea.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

No idea.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I think the time I interviewed William Shatner and he said, “Do you think, Michaelangelo, that...” in full Shatner voice; I was so stunned I can’t remember the rest of the sentence.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

“Everybody knows that...” followed by anything. No, they don’t.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

I went to a rave in Chicago in 1995 and this woman who was introducing the DJs was onstage, microphone in hand, was just gibbering away. She was clearly messed up on something. I jeered her; standing next to me were two young girls who weren’t saying a word, just staring straight ahead. I asked them, huffily, if they knew who the woman onstage was. One of them said, “My mother.” I shut up after that.

MIKE MCGONIGAL

Why is music important to you?

I guess I can’t imagine life without it, and I very much appreciate being alive, so...

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“Wild West Hero” by Electric Light Orchestra combined Beatle-esque harmonies and spaced-out synths and disco strings with a crazy, huge drum sound and silly lyrics about wanting to be a cowboy hero. Who wouldn’t love a song like that? I was ten years old, and I was hooked.

What song can’t you abide and why?

Highly crafted/polished mediocrity is the worst sin in all of the arts. So I’d have to say anything ever recorded by anthemic, Irish rock & roll band U2—that’s the letter U and the numeral 2.

What is your favorite line from a song?

Take Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” place the lyrics on a wall, and throw a dart. Whichever line it lands nearest to, that’s the one. That’s my favorite.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

THE GOSPEL DISCOGRAPHY, 1943–1970 (revised edition), Cedric Hayes & Bob Laughton.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION, Penelope Spheeris, 1981.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Maybe BASHO SINGS by Robbie Basho?

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I’m sorry; I never leave my house. I once had a lengthy chat room discussion with Dean Wareham from Galaxie 500—that’s who they said they were, anyway.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Every other word I write? Let’s see—the word “seminal” should be banned from music writing. That would be a nice start.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Anything I did before I was twenty-five—seriously!

LINCOLN MICHEL

Why is music important to you?

I like nodding, swaying, and rhythmically tapping my foot.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

The earliest song I remember loving was “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” by The Beatles as a prepubescent boy. It’s not a very good song, though. I think I just liked the hitting heads with a hammer part.

What song can’t you abide and why?

Anything by U2. When the most interesting thing about your band is that your singer wears ugly sunglasses, your music is probably boring.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm”—“Search and Destroy” by Iggy Pop.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

THE LOSER by Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard weds his misanthropic monologue, ostensibly about Glenn Gould’s GOLDBERG VARIATIONS, with an odd but compelling prose musicality.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

I don’t what my favorite is (maybe THIS IS SPINAL TAP), but the music-themed movie that influenced me the most as a teenager was my bootleg copy of THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

I can hardly go a day without blasting Mastodon’s REMISSION. That is the greatest metal album of the last twenty years. Also, while The Band are critically lauded, their first two albums deserve to be as familiar as anything Dylan or The Beatles did.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I’m not sure I have a good one that truly involves me. I do remember being in a front row of a Les Savy Fav show and the singer—who, if you haven’t seen, looks like a cross between a gym teacher and a viking—tore his pants off, grabbed my friend’s outstretched hand and pressed it into his sweaty nethers. My friend turned to me and said, “I’m never washing this hand again!”

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Sometimes music writers go a bit overboard inventing hybrid genres to describe an artist’s sound. “The next big thing in nu-blues-jazzcore-fusion-hop!”

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

I’ve definitely broken broken several pairs of glasses rocking out at punk shows. That might have been more blurry than embarrassing, though.

WALTON MUYUMBA

Why is music important to you?

Music is my lifeblood.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“Stay the Night” by Chicago; I was twelve years old.

What song can’t you abide and why?

“Mornin’” by Al Jarreau.

What is your favorite line from a song?

Too many to choose only one!

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

SENT FOR YOU YESTERDAY by John Edgar Wideman.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

THE WIZ.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

3+3 by The Isley Brothers.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

Having drinks with the members of TV on The Radio in London, England.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Calling anything new “GENIUS” or “GROUNDBREAKING.”

 JOE NICK PATOSKI

Why is music important to you?

Music is better than any language or form of communication because it can move your body as well as your mind.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.
 
“Cool Water” by the Sons of the Pioneers followed by “Waterloo” by Homer and Jethro.

What song can’t you abide and why?

America’s “Horse With No Name” because the words are beyond dumb (“in the desert, you can remember your name, for there ain’t no one for to give you no shame”) even if they sound sorta like Neil Young.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“In the desert, you can remember your name….” and “It’s too late to stop now.”

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

DINO by Nick Tosches.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

PERFORMANCE (some twisted mofos behind that one).

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

TOGETHER AFTER FIVE by the Sir Douglas Quintet.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

Sold two used records to Bob Dylan once while manning the counter of OK Records in Austin (the VERY BEST OF ERIC CLAPTON and WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH by the Mothers of Invention). I was not impressed with either selection, especially since I was spinning Buddy Holly on the sound system.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Any phrase with the word “Best.”

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

I’ve never been embarrassed at a concert because everyone is always making asses out of themselves at concerts. No way could I stand out. First beer I ever bought when I was sixteen was at a James Brown show in Fort Worth. Then again, I did try to yell a few times during the recording of JAMES BROWN LIVE in Dallas, 1968, but I have never been able to pick out my voice. And I guess I did embarrass myself when I was flown to KC to interview Jim Dandy of Black Oak Arkansas before a show at Arrowhead Stadium. The story got killed but I did charge a bottle of Jack Daniels to room service after I observed Ed Ward doing the same before a Willie Nelson picnic. The management didn’t like it.

CHARLES PETERSEN

Why is music important to you?

It keeps the spheres from falling out of the sky.
 
Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“The Sign,” Ace of Base, ten years old.
 
What song can’t you abide and why?

“Dashboard,” by Modest Mouse. It’s toughest when someone you love lets you down.
 
What is your favorite line from a song?

“I Dream a Highway Back to You,” Gillian Welch.
 
Please name your favorite music-themed book.

SONNETS TO ORPHEUS, Rilke.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

ALMOST FAMOUS, if only for the immortal exchange, now a byword in my family:

Mom: Call me if anyone gets drunk.
Son: I will call you if anyone *anywhere* gets drunk

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

JACKSON C. FRANK, by Jackson C. Frank.
 
Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

The time I asked my man Lexy Benaim of the Harlem Shakes how to understand Jewish women.
 
Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Basically any use of the word “angular.”
 
What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

For embarrassment nothing beats the simple act of going to a Jethro Tull concert in Paris in 2001.

MATTHEW PITT

Why is music important to you?

Working in silence is a struggle for me. In fact, before starting a new story or novel chapter, I often spend time hunting songs with melodies—and more often, rhythms—that I think will inform a character, or the prose’s tone. Many writers build new work, I know, around a specific image. My first inspiration is almost always rooted in sound.
 
Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

For its effect: “Summer Breeze,” Seals & Crofts (age five): I’d flirt with my babysitters by singing it gently into their ears.
 
For its craft: “Slip Slidin’ Away,” Paul Simon (from THE CONCERT IN CENTRAL PARK, age six). Though I misheard several lines: “Billy, we’re gliding down the highway…”; “You know it’s an eerie destination, the more you’re slip slidin’ away.”
 
What song can’t you abide and why?

Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Minor, Op. 40—what a hack that guy was.
 
Seriously, though: Bruce Willis’s cruel cover of The Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself.” Listen closely and you can hear, in the background of this travesty, the session musicians plotting to gouge out Bruce’s eyes.
 
What is your favorite line from a song?

Gracious—I could list a loved lyric for each day of the year (note to self: desk/wall calendar idea?). But here’s one that just came up on the iPod: “As far as Salina, I can get that good station from LaRue/Now I’m searching the dial while scanning the sky for a patch of blue” (“Wichita Skyline,” Shawn Colvin).
 
Please name your favorite music-themed book.

Kind of stumped. For fiction: Stuart Dybek’s I SAILED WITH MAGELLAN.
 
Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

Does WAITING FOR GUFFMAN count? I’m saying it does.
CHANGE OF HABIT, Elvis’s last acting role—co-starring with Mary frickin’ Tyler Moore.
 
Please name the most underrated album of all time.

“All time”? I wouldn’t dare guess. What about an underrated record I own? I find myself wishing more people were devotees of The Silos’ self-titled third album.
 
Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.
 
Here’s a surreal one: In college, my apartment mates and I were throwing a party, with live music. I went to grab something from my room, but some people were blocking my door. It was Kim and Thurston from Sonic Youth, intently reading the quotes, comic strips, and agitprop bumper stickers I’d taped up.
 
Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

“This artist X is like artist Y on Illicit Drug-Z.” Seriously, that’s maybe one notch up from sporting event, locker-room banality.
 
What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?
 
Jumping onstage during a Paul Westerberg show (at his invitation), holding the man’s lyric sheets, and singing along (off-key; of this I have no doubt) during his encore. So mortifying, I could BARELY bring myself to do the exact same thing two nights later.

JAMIE QUATRO

Why is music important to you?

My mom is a concert pianist, and made me take lessons till I was sixteen, when she finally let me quit so I could be a cheerleader. (I know.) Now, of course, I’m grateful—such a gift to be able to sit down and lose myself in a Chopin ballade or Beethovan sonata.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

Olivia Newton John, “Hopelessly Devoted to You.” I was eight. I loved GREASE, until the end of the movie when white-nightgown Sandy turned black-leather. I remember being horrified—which probably says something about me, though I’m not sure what.

What song can’t you abide and why?

Hate to criticize The Boss, but Springsteen’s “Glory Days” drives me insane—that hook repeated ad nauseam.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“Remember when I moved in you/and the holy dove was moving too/and every breath we drew was hallelujah?” Jeff Buckley’s version of this song still makes me cry.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

The book of Psalms.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

THE SOUND OF MUSIC.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Boston’s first.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

My husband’s aunt is ’70s rocker Suzi Quatro, who played Leather Tuscadero on HAPPY DAYS. I’ve actually never met her. I did throw the football around with her son when he was about eight—this was in Essex, England—and I remember he asked, “Do you mind if I talk American?” Turned out that meant he wanted to say “yeah” a lot.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

I’ve never properly embarrassed myself at a concert—a fact I blame on white-nightgown Sandy.

ALICE RANDALL

Why is music important to you?

Songs are important to me. Songs are the elemental art form. As far as I know there is no culture where there are no songs. There are cultures without sculpture, and cultures without dance, but wherever there are human beings mothers sing to babies. When we get grown all the songs, at least for me, are work songs, they help you keep on keeping on, they help you coordinate with your fellow workers, and coordinate with the spin of the planet, they help keep you safe, and they help keep you engaged; they help preserve memories and they inspire you to make new ones; they magically provide a reality you can escape into without removing you from the reality you are in—when you’re grown.
 
Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

The Beatles' “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” I was five and I carried a Beatles lunch box to kindergarten. I was the only kid in my class with one. I lived in Motown. I attended an all-black parochial school. It was the first and only non-soul or jazz single my Malcolm X loving daddy ever bought. About the same time I fell in love with the gospel classic “Motherless Child,” and I was perplexed and intrigued, I didn’t know those words but that’s what I was, for the very first time. Being a motherless child a long way from home seemed like a good thing to me.
 
What song can’t you abide and why?

“Goodbye Earl,” in which two friends poison a bad husband and roll him in a rug and settle into a sweet life of selling jams and hams, and “Gunpowder & Lead” in which a young woman awaits her abuser with a loaded shotgun—I can’t abide the powerful case they make for vengeance—when listened to superficially. They lure us out into that slippery but significant slope where we must confront and articulate the differences between songs that allow us to rebalance the scales of emotional justice by singing along to a compelling fantasy of retribution leaving the listener in a state to better offer mercy, better negotiate self-respecting escape, and songs that seduce us into stepping one step closer to enacting violent, self-defeating fantasies, by making us less shocked by violence. I can’t abide the way they make me wonder—why do I love this song so much?
 
What is your favorite line from a song?

I could be flippant and write, “Slap my face and shook me like a rag doll, don’t that sound like real man, I’m going to show him what a little girl’s made of, gunpowder and lead,” following up on the question before—I love so many lines. There would be the lines to live by; the lines beautifully constructed; the lines that give a window into how others live—all very different…some I love bubbling to the top of my head this morning…. “I been warped by the rain, driven by the snow…I’m drunk and dirty and don’t you know, and I’m still willin’…” “She made that apple pie from a memory…made them biscuits from a recollection that she had…” “I learned what it means, to be somebody’s baby, They let you lie in your bed by yourself and cry”….”There’s a hole in Daddy’s arms where all the money goes, Jesus died for nothing, I suppose.” “We may not can spare a roach a crumb, But we’re gonna make it…and if I have to carry ’round a sign Sayin’ help the deaf, the dumb, and the blind, I got your love and you know you got mine.” “The night came undone like a party dress/And fell at her feet in a beautiful mess.”
 
Please name your favorite music-themed book.

Michael Ondaatje’s COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER—love song to New Orleans and Buddy Bolden written way back when folk were not talking about Bolden…reading it aloud one Sunday in New Orleans a long time ago inspired me to write the song “Café du Monde” with Ray Kennedy (who’s worked with Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Joan Baez, Ray Davies). Jo-El Sonnier recorded our “Café du Monde”—it was a title cut. I like Jo-El and I love Ray so Ondaatje brought me some good music times.
 
Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

COAL MINER’S DAUGHTER—directed by Michael Apted. A celebration of Loretta telling her story in song, in autobiography, in film: every which way she wants.
 
Please name the most underrated album of all time.
 
Little Milton, 1965. WE’RE GOING TO MAKE IT. Prescient Poetry. The crossroad of North and South. Uptown urban poverty and deep Delta dishevelment. I always heard this as more of a promise to a people than a woman. WE’RE GOING TO MAKE IT is one that didn’t get its due. There are so many—when you love some pop country and some of the slicker r&b—the kind that are tough and sharp in the center but dressed up in a few earnest pretensions. So many times the elegant intellectual reviewers only appreciate poor people unvarnished and untainted by social ambitions, especially social ambitions of the kind they don’t share.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.
 
I don’t kiss and tell, or raise kids and tell, or make money together and tell, or love and tell, or go out hiking through Radnor and tell, or chase trains and scream out on the tracks and tell, or give baby showers and tell, or get loved up on and tell—so I got nothing to tell—but I have a lot of sweet music memories after twenty-five years in Nashville and an early childhood in Motown that included going to see The Supremes sing at The Copacabana.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

The idea that you can meet a stranger in a contrived space of a few hour interview and do more than scratch the surface of their self…

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Fall asleep, stone sober, across three empty chairs in the front row—because I was young and mistaken and thought it would be as interesting to my friends, the performers, to sing me to sleep as it would be for me to be sung to sleep. Or maybe it was interesting for those macho boys to do the mama thing all that time ago—they never complained about it.

DIANE ROBERTS

Why is music important to you?

Music, like poetry, wanders the labyrinth of the unconscious. It’s time travel. Music can take you back to the cool clothes you used to have, the Joyce-reading boyfriend with the cheekbones, the moments when you felt most alive. And you’ve got to dance to something.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“She Loves You” by The Beatles. I was five; it was a single that belonged to my older cousin. We played it on an ivory vinyl and fake-wood RCA record player in our dining room and I ponied to it.

What song can’t you abide and why?

“Killing Me Softly.” Ghastly. All that posturing crap about the “young boy” singing her life with his words. Gooey, flavorless, self-congratulatory. Even done by The Fugees.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“He who fucks nuns will later join the church” from The Clash, “Death or Glory,” LONDON CALLING.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

THE CRYING OF LOT 49. Thomas Pynchon includes pastiches of sixteenth-century lyrics, British Invasion pop, and weird corporate songs in this story of a secret underground communication network. Here’s The Paranoids’ “Too Fat to Frug”:

    Too fat to Frug,
    That’s what you tell me all the time,
    When you really try’n’ to put me down,
    But I’m hip,
    So close your big fat lip,
    Yeah, baby,
    I may be too fat to Frug,
    But at least I ain’t too slim to Swim.
 
Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

CONTROL—a biopic about Ian Curtis of Joy Division.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

I never have a clue how to answer a question like this.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I met Richard Thompson on a boat going down the Thames. His very cool wife Nancy Covey had organized a festival of Southern Culture at the South Bank: poets, musicians, painters. I was writing about the whole thing for THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION, and so got to hang out with the artists. I remember Guy Clark and his son strumming guitars, and James Dickey knocking back Bourbon, flanked by two tall blond Scandinavian girls. I tried to talk to Richard Thompson about Sufi Islam, but since I didn’t know anything about Sufi Islam, it didn’t go so well. Still, he was nice, and even his speaking voice was like a clarinet.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Porn-ish metaphors: thrusting, driving, banging guitars, chords, drums, whatever.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Reaching down my cleavage with a Kleenex (I was wearing a strapless evening dress) to mop out Shane MacGowan’s spit and throwing it onto the stage. The Pogues (then nearly unknown) were playing an Oxford College summer ball.

NICHOLAS ROMBES

Why is music important to you?

Music is important to me because it has the power to move me, to change me. And as a writer, I owe some of my best words and sentences to music in ways that are impossible to explain. On lucky nights, when everything comes together and the sky is especially dark, I feel like it’s the music that is doing the writing, not me. Sometimes, it’s the unlikeliest combinations. When I was writing A CULTURAL DICTIONARY OF PUNK, my main inspiration was the classical pianist Mitsuko Uchida. I have no idea about the mysteries of how or why, but her music fueled the best passages in the book. I wish I knew how to thank her.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

This is tough. My earliest memory of truly loving a song goes back to Harry Belafonte’s  “Mama Look a Boo Boo,” from his 1959 album HARRY BELAFONTE AT CARNEGIE HALL. My parents owned this album, and I’d lie on the living room floor in my pajamas listening to it. I think I was around six or seven years old. I just loved the melody, and the story the song told. Back then, I know I didn’t consider the differences between a live and a studio-recorded album, but I’m sure that the crowd reaction and participation was a big part of the appeal.

What song can’t you abide and why?

Sting’s “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free.” It’s a complete betrayal. Self-important, New Age-y lyrics. A perfect mood ruiner. Makes you want to go out and cut down a tree.

What is your favorite line from a song?

I love these lines from the song “Venus,” off the Television album MARQUEE MOON: “Suddenly my eyes were so soft and shaky/Oh I knew there was pain, but pain is not aching.” Maybe they sound kind of silly here, separated from the music. I don’t know. But they are just great, mysterious lines.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

GULCHER: POST-ROCK CULTURAL PLURALISM IN AMERICA (1649–1980) by Richard Meltzer. Originally published by Straight Arrow Books in 1972. A completely insane—and inspiring—book.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

DRESSED TO KILL, directed by Brian De Palma and released in 1980. The score, by the Italian composer Pino Donaggio, goes bloodily perfectly with De Palma’s slow-motion, split-screen images. Although this movie is usually categorized as a psychological thriller, it’s really a musical. Huge, long stretches of time go by with no dialogue. At some times, it feels like Angie Dickinson is actually guided by the music.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

A lot of people probably know about the group Guided by Voices, but a lot of people don’t. This is for the people who don’t. Their 2002 album UNIVERSAL TRUTHS AND CYCLES should have been a big hit. Everybody should know the name Robert Pollard, in the same way that they know the name Paul McCartney or Aretha Franklin, because he is just as good.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

A few years ago, on a sunny day on Woodward Avenue in Detroit, I ran into a woman who looked an awful lot like Karen O from The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. “I’m sorry, do you have a light?” she asked, her eyes as black as her hair. Although I didn’t smoke, it turned out I had a book of matches I had snatched from a bar to write down hastily an idea for a short story about a famous, beautiful, long-legged singer in a rock and roll band. I lit her cigarette for her. She leaned in to me, and cupped her hand to stop the wind. She smelled like lemons. That night, the matchbook fell out of my pants pocket. I picked it up, and noticed that someone had scrawled on the inside cover, in mascara-like black ink: “Don’t write it. K.O.”

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

That the golden age of writing about music is over.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

I think it was in 1981. Kenny Rogers and Crystal Gayle played at the Masonic Auditorium in Toledo, Ohio. I loved her songs and her really very long hair. I remember I was very excited and jumped up and began clapping enthusiastically at the end of a song. Except the song wasn’t over. I sat down sheepishly. Until the next song was over.

BETSY SHEPHERD

Why is music important to you?

To (mis)quote Louis Armstrong, if you have to ask, you'll never know.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

I was all over “ICE, ICE BABY” when I got the single for my seventh birthday. These were humble beginnings, but I'll never forget where it all started...I can still sing it word for word.

What song can’t you abide and why?

Anything with Steve Perry's voice on it.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“Roses are red and violets are purple/ Sugar is sweet and so is maple surple” from “Dang Me” by Roger Miller.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

HELLFIRE by Nick Tosches; WOODY GUTHRIE:  A LIFE by Joe Klein, SWEET SOUL MUSIC by Peter Guralnick.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

SHAKESPEARE WAS A BIG GEORGE JONES FAN about Cowboy Jack Clement, BE HERE TO LOVE ME about Townes Van Zandt, GENGHIS BLUES about Tuvan throat singing, and Les Blank’s J’AI ETE AU BAL about cajun and zydeco music.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

No question, DEL SHANNON SINGS HANK WILLIAMS.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

Charlie Louvin unexpectedly kissed me on the lips while I posed for a picture with him backstage. He said it was payment for the picture, even though no terms were discussed before hand.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

I am so sick of scholarly Bob Dylan books being written. Yeah, Bob Dylan is awesome and I don't need someone with a Ph.D. to explain why.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

One time I was dancing with this drunk guy who spun me around so hard, I went flying across the dance floor onto the stage, toppling two microphones and landing under the fiddle player...in a dress.  Talk about record scratch moment.

JUSTIN TAYLOR

Why is music important to you?

It’s tempting to say that this is like asking why water is important, i.e. it’s so fundamental and essential it negates the possibility of explanation—but of course I know that this isn’t empirically true, since it doesn’t seem to affect everyone that deeply. So maybe the answer is that music is important to me because it makes me want to say things like the thing about water, and believe they are true. That’s a nice feeling.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

I remember this cassette tape that had one of those personalized happy birthday songs on it, like not “the” happy birthday song, but some song about it being your birthday, and there’s a spot in the song where the kid’s name can be plugged in. I don’t know where it came from; I think it was on a mix-tape my father made for me that also had the Ghostbusters song on it and some rock music he was into—Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” maybe? This probably makes it sound like I had some insane family, but I think they just heard this stuff on the radio and liked it. Except the birthday song, obviously. I still don’t know where that came from. Or maybe the whole thing is just a screen memory, but anyway, when I think of my earliest exposure to music I think of that tape or tapes, but mostly of the birthday song and how weird and amazing it was to hear my own name sung on the tape, like it knew who I was. I was probably three or four years old—unless I’m getting that wrong, too.

What song can’t you abide and why?

That James Blunt song “You’re Beautiful.”

What is your favorite line from a song?

Jesus—that’s hard. Well, there are a dozen Dylan lines I might name, but that feels a little too much like joining the winning team. I’m going to go with this line from “How to Rent a Room” by the Silver Jews—“I want to wander through the night/As a figure in the distance even to my own eye.” It’s the second part that really gets me. It’s so simply put, but it has this enormous depth to it, like Kafka’s parable of the Messiah or something. I’d say ever since I heard that line, it’s never really left my head. And you know it meant something to Berman because it turns up also in one of his poems, and he very rarely doubles up like that.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

Anything by Dennis Cooper. He understands what it means to love music and be inspired by it like few people do, and he’s totally unashamed to just wear that love on his sleeve—on his books’ sleeves. His enthusiasm is totally catching—I read him and I end up on a music-buying spree. And we have very different taste, so I don’t always love what I end up with, but boy—when I do. Also, in the alternate-universe answer to this question, I choose THE BALLAD BOOK OF JOHN JACOB NILES. It’s the music and lyrics to all of these folk songs that Niles collected, accompanied by these terse little stories about the people he collected them from. I don’t play at all, so the book isn’t as “useful” to me as it might be, but I think Niles is a fascinating dude and I like flipping through it and reading all the variants. I wish I owned the complete Francis James Child.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

I don’t think I have one. I’ll sit through any concert doc once (GIMME SHELTER, LAST WALTZ), but I’d usually rather listen than watch. I’M NOT THERE was about as good as it could have been, I thought.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

RECKONING by The Grateful Dead.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

Well I’m an inveterate Deadhead (see previous answer), and for a long time a regular reader of Robert Hunter’s blog. He’s one of those guys that’s a living legend, on the one hand, but on the other hand is just this dude. A couple years ago, I was thinking about trying to write a book about The Grateful Dead and folk music—and the centerpiece was going to be about Hunter’s use of folk tropes in his lyrics, and what that meant. So I wrote him this long letter full of praise and explaining my theories about his work, and what I wanted the book to be. In a lot of ways it was really going to be about him—his writing, his role in the band, his appropriations and reworkings of the old songs and stories—and I just assumed that he would be eager to participate, because I mean who wouldn’t want to see their life’s work analyzed and explicated by an unabashed partisan? Robert Hunter wouldn’t, apparently. He wrote me back a very terse letter, the gist of which was that the world needs another Grateful Dead book about as badly as it needs another hole in the ozone layer. Oops.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

Hyperbole that proves the critic’s intellect, comp-lit background, and access to a good thesaurus, but which comes at the expense of anything revelatory, descriptive or useful about the work in question.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

I wanted to interview Will Oldham so I went backstage at a show at Joe’s Pub in New York to ask him. It wasn’t like a real “backstage,” just this room nobody even tried to keep me out of, but he was in the middle of talking to all these people, which was a situation I should have obviously anticipated but didn’t, so I just stood there, not wanting to interrupt because he was clearly seeing some of these people for the first time in a while. But I was also doing a very bad job of looking like I belonged there, because I had nobody to talk to, and also I was just staring at Will. So finally he says to the guy he’s hugging, “let me see what this guy wants,” and came over to me. He was incredibly nice, as it turned out, and was glad to do the interview, which we did by phone a week or two later.

GRAEME THOMSON

Why is music important to you?   

It expands as required to fill all the gaps. 

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“Mull of Kintyre” by Wings. I was five. I bought the single on vinyl and over thirty years later, on the very rare occasions I hear it, it still vividly recalls an old manual turntable and a freezing Scottish winter.

What song can’t you abide and why?

“My Way.” A deathbed ego rant, a self-aggrandizing, spittle-flecked, red-faced, vein-popping "fuck you" to the world. It’s the last testament of a deranged despot, the vainglorious valediction of a CAPO DI TUTTI CAPI, the curtain-call of a deluded king in exile. Horrible, horrible song.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“In fourteen months I’ve only smiled once and I didn’t do it consciously.” [“Up To Me,” Bob Dylan.] It’s a credo through which I try to live my life.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

I think CARELESS LOVE: THE UNMAKING OF ELVIS PRESLEY by Peter Guralnick is the saddest story ever told.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL is by turns a hilarious and poignant masterpiece that shows THIS IS SPINAL TAP to be a work of considerable restraint. 

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Today? SURF by Roddy Frame, formerly of Aztec Camera. A collection of astonishingly beautiful, meticulously crafted songs that avoids the usual pitfalls of acoustic albums (clichéd song structures, lazy rhymes, third-hand emotional tics, lack of texture) and delivers a stunning, understated showcase for dextrous finger-picking, ambitious pop melodies and gorgeous vocals. Nobody, I’m sure, could fail to love it.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

I once wrote a book about Willie Nelson and managed to pin him down for an interview in a hotel room in West London, where he was holed up with a British friend. He offered me a puff on his joint but I declined, having already been warned by his harmonica player that Willie’s dope is on no account to be trifled with. His companion, however, wasn’t quite so well briefed. He took two hits on Willie’s reefer, stood up, crashed backward against the wall and fell to the floor, where he remained throughout the interview. Willie barely batted an eyelid. He just glanced down at his passed-out compadre and said to no one in particular, “I think we lost him…”

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

I find myself increasingly working against the convenient idea of a linear narrative in pop history, particularly the notion that punk somehow marked a year zero. If there’s one thing that the digitalization of music makes clear it’s that the past meets the future every second of every day, in an untidy, ungainly embrace. Everything happens all at once, all the time, meaning popular music in its broadest sense doesn’t progress so much as EXPAND. The musical past is always with us, right alongside the present, continually open to reinterpretation, more so than ever in the wider present of the current age, where a considerable portion of its history is available instantly at the click of a button, arriving without context or explanation.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

I walked into a glass door at an American Music Club gig. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.

RICHIE UNTERBERGER

Why is music important to you?

Because it’s fun, fun, fun, as The Beach Boys once sang.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“Hey Jude” by The Beatles. I was eight years old (though it had come out a couple of years earlier).

What song can’t you abide and why?

“Hold the Line” by Toto, which was played incessantly on the FM dial when it came out and was the song more than any other that made me stop listening to commercial radio.

What is your favorite line from a song?

That changes almost daily, I can’t just pick one.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

HIGH FIDELITY by Nick Hornby.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

A HARD DAY’S NIGHT [about The Beatles].

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

OAR by Skip Spence.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

Arthur Brown has the image of being a lunatic running around onstage with his helmet on fire. When he met me at his home in Britain for an interview, he was an exceedingly nice and mild-mannered man, serving me health food.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

“Though it’s not for everyone, fans of the style should enjoy this record,” or variations thereof. Offer your opinion as to whether it’s good or not!

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

It’s more something I didn’t do, and it mostly wasn’t a music show, though it was a concert. I had the chance to see comedian Robert Klein perform at my high school and didn’t go because I was too cheap.

DOUG VAN GUNDY

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were. 

“Pinball Wizard” by The Who.  I was four years old, and my father was working on his dissertation with the radio on all of the time.  Most of the songs didn’t reach through my childish brain, but “Pinball Wizard” made me sit up and notice.

What song can’t you abide and why? 

ANYTHING by Céline Dion. She is the devil incarnate. I don’t have proof, but I know this in my bones.

What is your favorite line from a song?

“Come down off the cross, we can use the wood.” Tom Waits, “Come on up to the House.”

Please name your favorite music-themed book. 

LAST NIGHT’S FUN by Ciarah Carson.  Every one of these short essays shines with a jewel-like light.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie. 

BOUND FOR GLORY.

Please name the most underrated album of all time. 

THE HAMMONS FAMILY:  A WEST VIRGINIA FAMILY’S TRADITIONS. Music from my backyard that I didn’t know existed before it changed my life.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing. 

We all know what eponymous means, please don’t ever write it again.

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

I once knocked my 1905 Bacon banjo off of its stand during a show and snapped the neck clean off.

ED WARD

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

“At the Hop,” by Danny & The Juniors. I was about to turn ten.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

THE BEAR COMES HOME by Rafi Zabor. The only book I’ve ever read that gets into the experience of playing music.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

THE FIVE HEARTBEATS. Counterfeits an era of pop music perfectly — and the score’s by Stanley Clarke!

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Perform.

RJ WHEATON

Why is music important to you?

There’s a poem by Auden where he writes about music being invented out of the ether—unlike other art forms like writing or painting, which are based on things in the real world. Perhaps for that reason, music is this amazing blank slate onto which people map every kind of social activity—dating, flirting, reminiscing, seducing, arguing. Every kind of social dance and interaction you can imagine. Music is the great enabler. You can’t say that about every art form. People fight within architecture but rarely fall into bed with one other because of it.

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were.

Probably Musical Youth’s “Pass the Dutchie” when I was six. It’s fair to say that the precise meaning of the lyrics—not to mention the embedded social and cultural commentary on 1980s England—were lost on me at the time. But the sheer joy of it was quite a contrast to everything else that the experience of being English was likely to teach you. I was listening to Madness about that time too.

What song can’t you abide and why?

Chris de Burgh’s “The Lady in Red.” This is obviously a collective wound from which we are all still suffering, but that shouldn’t prevent us from asking some hard questions, primarily about justice and our capacity for pain. Why is it appropriate for a love song to sound like a dirge? Is it okay that Eric Clapton’s vacuous “Wonderful Tonight” has been redeemed simply by comparison? What does it say about our society that we associate romance with aural trauma in this way? If you play this song at the same time as Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” will the universe implode in the saccharine equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider?

What is your favorite line from a song?

Right now —“late at night, the air was cool/we snuck into the swimming pool/you dove headfirst, I waded in/The scent of chlorine upon our skin.” From Freezepop’s “Swimming Pool.” Sensual, tactile lyrics; hazy, gorgeous, gauzy, hallucinogenic song. It’s indescribably sexy. “Everything is perfect now.” You’re goddamn right it is.

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

Michael Ondaatje’s COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER. Everything you would want and expect from a book about music: superb sense of place, beautiful prose, and an evocation of sound which makes you weep not to have been alive and hear it pour incandescent from Buddy Bolden’s soul. Amazing. Plus there’s the avant-garde structure, remorseless violence, and mental illness. You really can’t go wrong.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s MAGNOLIA. There’s Aimee Mann’s soundtrack—which make the film function at moments as if it were a musical—and Jon Brion’s extraordinary score, which sets up residence in your nervous system and Will Not Relent. You will not breathe on your own schedule for three hours. Astonishing.

Please name the most underrated album of all time.

Lewis Taylor’s 1996 eponymous debut album. A moment at which UK dance music met Isley Brothers guitar riffs and Marvin Gaye’s “Hear, My Dear” and could have changed the shape of r&b. A direction not taken and an amazing talent not heard by nearly enough people.

Please tell us of any interesting encounter you’ve had with a famous or semi-famous musician.

My utter failure to connect with Buck 65 for an interview in 2006. I believe I attempted to speak to him on his cell at every airport, railway station, and 2 A.M. dive in Western Europe, but never for long enough to establish much more than this was not a good time to talk, man. It was like trying to get in touch with the inhabitants of his “Riverbed” songs, and from that perspective it was quite insightful. But my phone bill ached. Most expensive non-interview ever.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

“Elder statesman of the blues.” 207,000 hits. Who is responsible for this abominable turn of phrase? Do you think any of these musicians like to hear that? And who is the listener who is going to read that and go to the music?

What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done at a music show or concert?

Trying to write in a notebook at a drum and bass gig where the music was so loud that nobody could see and the acoustic violence was so intense that you were lucky to leave with your chest cavity intact. Trying to write in a notebook. Wrong scene, dude.

Or, possibly, trying to find my own pulse at an acid jazz gig. Again, wrong scene.

MARK WINEGARDNER

Please name the first recorded song that you ever truly loved and how old you were. 

“The Impossible Dream,” Robert Goulet.  I was four.

What song can’t you abide and why? 

“Unchained Melody.” Thanks to that goddamned pottery wheel scene in GHOST.

What is your favorite line from a song? 

“The desert’s quiet and Cleveland’s cold/And so the story ends, we’re told.” (From “Pancho and Lefty.”)

Please name your favorite music-themed book.

Nonfiction: SWEET SOUL MUSIC, Peter Guralnick. Fiction: THE DEVIL’S DREAM, Lee Smith.

Please name your favorite music-themed movie. 

Finally, an easy question! THIS IS SPINAL TAP.

Please name an annoying cliché that can be found in too much music writing.

The album review that’s mostly positive, then spends the antepenultimate and penultimate paragraphs on why it sucks, then finishes with the all in all, it's kind of good closer.