I believe that writing on music is experienced inside your head, is not a physically present in the world, it has a different kind of authority and prominence and you absorb it differently.

If you wanna write non-fiction you have to be interested in the world.

Subject is very important. If you're going to write non-fiction the style means nothing or very little. The content justifies the effort you need to put into the writing itself.

The idea with a collection is sort of to begin with a kind of bang.

Believe me, I think if I stopped writing when I left The Voice I would have quite a legacy. But the fact of the matter was, it never occurred to me to stop.

I like to say that I don't have the slightest doubt that Barack Obama read me in the early 80s. It's the kind of person he was!

People believe that criticism should be objective, whatever that means, but I really don't understand what people mean by that. I guess if you're doing sonata-allegro procedure analysis, you can be objective for a page or two. But in pop? Really hard.

I believe an editor's job is to help a writer sound like himself or herself.

Ultimately, to insist that rock criticism be political is first to insist that the humans who make and enjoy music are embroiled in politics whether they like it or not - and whether they know it or not.

In fact, many rock critics look askance at explicitly political lyrics, which I think is pretty stupid, without denying that some political lyrics are also pretty stupid.