[A] You romanticize what my reviewing work is like. Painful life crises or competing entertainments aside, I play music every minute I'm home or out alone with my headphones. But note that playing it means I'm hearing it not that I'm listening to it. In fact, for music I'm hearing to catch my ear so that I concentrate on it and listen carefully is fundamental to how I make judgments. That music inspires attention is my first clue that it may be worth writing about, because usually that means I'm enjoying it. Then I try to concentrate and find out how that grabs me. Then I find out how it holds up to repetition. And somewhere in there I start to concentrate on and isolate and maybe analyze my degree of interest or pleasure, gradually getting a grip on its skill or substance or beauty or energy or lyrical acuity or any combination of the above. And sometime in that phase comes the work phase you imagine where I say to myself you're the dean now nail this one. Except that whether or not I'm the dean is usually irrelevant. I'm just a critic, doing what critics do. Which is a fun job as jobs go.

[A] I can think of a few. My 84-year-old friend Peter Stampfel contracted a vocal disorder called dysphonia in 2017 at 78, 17 or so years after he'd conceived and begun his oft-delayed 100-song Peter Stampfel's 20th Century in 100 Songs and maybe three-four years after he'd started work on it again. Basically, he couldn't really sing anymore. Yet he could whisper and whistle and sometimes simulate singing and he somehow finished the thing. Chuck Berry's excellent farewell Chuck, released shortly after he died at 90 in 2017, was recorded well after he turned 80. The New Orleans trumpeter Doc Cheatham recorded 1992's The Eighty-Seven Years of Doc Cheatham, when he was pushing that age. He also backed classic blueswoman Alberta Hunter, who enjoyed a circa-1980 three-album revival when she was around 85. Barbara Dane, who in 1973 put out an album called I Hate the Capitalist System, released the much sexier Throw It Away in 2016, when she was 88. Tony Bennett is not only in his nineties but has Alzheimer's yet has his timing and knows the words on his two Lady Gaga collabs. And of course there's the miraculous Willie Nelson, now 90, who by my count has released some dozen-plus albums in the past decade, some of them--December Day and A Beautiful Time are my picks--among his best ever. Paul McCartney will be 81 in June and I doubt he's stopped. Ditto I hope for Randy Newman, who'll be 80 in November. And Paul Simon, now 81, just released an ambitious album I've yet to get my teeth into that certainly has something to say. I probably could come up with more possibilities, but that should do for now.

[A] As Carola put it when I passed the question along: "I'm not exactly a hardcore science fiction reader--put any mystery in my hands and I will probably finish it but in science fiction I may get so confused I stop. I checked out then-recent SF when I was writing The Only Ones but no one novel stands out except maybe Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. My favorite two all time would be Samuel Delany's Dhalgren and Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. Frank Herbert's Dune was probably the first SF I got into, and back in the '70s I was quite interested in Kate Wilhelm. Then, no special order--many Ursula LeGuins but let's say Left Hand of Darkness, many Kim Stanley Robinsons but let's say Shaman. Bruce Sterling influenced me and rings my chimes in general, but I'll just mention Zeitgeist (which I reviewed), and the cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades. I like William Gibson but no one novel in particular. Hard to pick any single Philip K. Dick so I'll just note one I rarely if ever hear discussed: We Can Build You, where these guys who are making human beings get in legal trouble so they make Abraham Lincoln so he can be their lawyer. More currently, I really like Kelly Link, who may technically be slipstream or fairytale. And I once did a reading alongside Sandra Newman, whose The Country of Ice Cream Star I loved so much I didn't even have time be be jealous."

[A] One of the rare grade-niggling questions worth answering. I've been grading albums since 1969, 54 years ago, which is way over 40. There've been three periods in this endeavor. The first was 1969-1989, when in theory the grades ran A plus down to E minus, although grades below C minus and especially D were always very rare. In 1990 I decided I was sick of writing pans and ran only reviews that ran from B plus to A plus, though within a few years Eric Weisbard convinced me to include one "Dud of the Month" in each CG, which could be as high as B minus (was there a B or two in there? don't recall). Then sometime during my Microsoft run I decided to add condensed "Honorable Mentions" marked ***, **, or *, all of which count as B plusses lower than the B plusses I write full graded reviews of, though a few *'s might end up B's were I doing that mental labor. So how many B plusses do we figure that makes now that I've graded somewhere over 15,000 albums and EPs? More than I have any inclination to count even with my webmaster Tom Hull helping--assuming those numbers aren't already hiding in some cranny of the wonderful site that transformed my career. [TH: here] MOREOVER, EVEN IF I COULD COUNT THEM ALL I COULDN'T REMEMBER THEM ALL. And moreover moveover, B plus doesn't mean for fans only. It means not an A but pretty damn good. So how many B plus records do I hear? Not many except when I'm doing retrospective comparisons for an essay or new album review. True, since all B plusses and Honorable Mentions are in what I call my A shelves, which among other things means full jewelbox or original packaging for visibility's sake, picking one out half-blind by feel is always a possibility--happened recently with Timbila's 2010 ** Remembering the Future, which sounded good, like at least a *** and maybe more. But basically, I listen to few B plus albums and very few HMs except when I'm backgrounding for a longer essay. True, I bet I played Garcia when he passed. And I suspect it sounded pretty good. But that was, oof, 28 years ago. So the details are lost forever.

[A] How can I say no? C: Yogi Berra; 1B: Don Mattingly; 2B: Bobby Richardson; 3B: Graig Nettles; SS: Derek Jeter (sorry Phil, I'll never forget you); LF: Dave Winfield; CF: Mickey Mantle (though DiMaggio did hang in there till 1951, I never saw him at his best); RF: Aaron Judge; DH: Reggie Jackson (yah yah A-Rod); RHP: David Cone (fuck Roger Clemens); LHP: Ron Guidry (sorry, Whitey); Relief (duh): Mariano Rivera.

[A] I worry about this stuff, in part because the technological details are so far beyond my ken. But as someone who never got all that upset about Auto-Tune, I find some of the more dire predictions unlikely. Will there be catchy or physically compelling new AI-generated subgenres? Probably, and they could be fun, though I bet some programmers' AIs will generate better results than others. What I'm much more skeptical about is emotionally resonant songwriting. A computer being able to replicate a voice is one thing. Being able to transmute an emotional experience into art is another, because though the appropriate language may be at the AI's disposal, the experience is another story. My favorite AI in art is Kim Stanley Robinson's Pauline in Aurora, who does in the long course of the book experience something like love and something like grief. But those capacities are many years in the making--more years than most human beings can live. And her/its aesthetic response, while real and quite touching, is relatively primitive. I recommend anyone who's interested in these questions to tackle Aurora and maybe 2312 too.

[A] Oddly enough, within the current year, when a conversation revealed that Carola didn't remember them, though she'd heard their records in their moment. I thought the replays sounded good but not as remarkable or compelling as I'd hoped. Carola more or less concurred.

[A] As my Clapton piece in Grown Up All Wrong explains, I respect Clapton's facility as a player but have warmed to him only intermittently. Not a big Yardbirds fan though they were certainly OK, not a big Cream fan ditto--Disraeli Gears is my favorite in their rather tiny catalogue, and always there's Jack Bruce's portentous proto-art-rock vocals to get past. The first Derek and the Dominoes album I love and still play occasionally because it fills a special need, and I also still go for 461 Ocean Boulevard. But except for one story that's where it ends and that's all I'm writing. The story is about seeing Derek and the Dominos in Pasadena in November 1970. Great show--that truly was a terrific band. But what I always recall is what my date had to say about it. She was a very intelligent and openminded colleague of mine at Cal Arts and we had a good time together even though she wasn't much into music. But this concert she loved loved loved, and in the course of telling her about the band I mentioned the silly way fans had of calling Clapton God. Judy didn't think it was silly at all. "I can see why," she said. So maybe there was something there I missed.

[A] Aretha on Atlantic. The first Ramones album for sure. Multiple hip-hop moments--Sugarhill Gang, Bambaataa, "That's the Joint," "The Message," Public Enemy too. Bikini Kill more than Sleater-Kinney, better though S-K were. Maybe the Backstreet Boys, who got that ball rolling. As much earlier did Sunny Ade, who I'd argue made Youssou possible. Arguably electric Miles. And Bob Dylan oughtn't be left off this list even though he slightly preceded "Brand New Bag." Indeed, ditto for the Beatles. "Brand New Bag" is musically fundamental. But culturally fundamental has to be in the mix.

[A] I've always liked standup but don't listen to or watch much of it--couldn't even get through the recent George Carlin doc though I dug him back in the '70s. We did enjoy and admire the recent documentary The Real Charlie Chaplin, which does justice to Chaplin's physical genius and conceptual daring while also establishing that superstar egomania long preceded Led Zeppelin. We also devoured Richard Pryor's Live in Concert on Netflix, where we both were struck by how physical as well as verbal-aural he was. I gave Pryor's nine-CD 2000 Rhino box And It's Deep, Too! an A plus. Answering you I pulled out Volume 1 of Fantasy's Lenny Bruce Originals and it sounds great though I don't think I ever reviewed it. And above all there's the Firesign Theater, a late-'60s-rooted made-for-the-recording-studio LA comedy troupe whose brilliant Shoes for Industry best-of is still at Amazon. Greil Marcus reported that he used them--and also Monty Python--as background music when he was writing Lipstick Traces. Perhaps overly trippy in retrospect. But terrific.

[A] I've put in a lot of ear time on what I think of as "Afrobeats" and its cousins, Burna Boy especially, with little to show for it. The main exception seems to be in the general vicinity of South African amapiano, which as I think about it now for the umpteenth time is the one recent Afropop genre that's beat-based rather than song-based. Which to bring it one step further is the only new African subgenre if that's even the term that's rhythm-based--whereas, to follow this line of thought, most of the many postcolonial African genres that have given me so much pleasure not to mention column inches over the years are rhythm-first albeit often with deeply pleasurable singers like Rochereau and Sunny Ade attached. That's way too simplistic with a profusion of exceptions--where does it leave the likes of Thomas Mapfumo, Oumou Sangare, the titanic Youssou N'Dour just for starters? But conceptually it's a start. I eagerly await an "Afrobeats" type who's a substantial as opposed to merely facile pop songwriter.

[A] I've played it at least twice in the past two-three years and it sounded fine--although not, of course, as musically revelatory as it did in 1986, when my Afropop explorations were still just beginning, although they preceded Graceland by several years--there are four African albums on the 1982 Dean's List, for instance. The Africa section of Is It Still Good to Ya? includes a long essay initially inspired by Graceland, which is on my site although condensed and revised for the book.

[A] Assuming anyone would actually do such a thing, I find it hard to imagine why I'd object while reserving the right to change my mind should said miracle, endeavor, or stab in the dark ensue. While we're both waiting, pick up The Only Ones. Some literary wannabes found the prose Carola invented there daunting, but for rock and rollers it reads like butter, and if you insist there's also an audiobook.

[A] Artists run out of gas, that's all. They have an idea or an angle or just a bunch of stuff to say--musically, verbally, or both. They're making a good living at it, enjoying the road although that seldom lasts, bonding with their bandmates. Conflicts arise, but at the very least they find themselves with a job they like. Only those artistic and interpersonal materials generally get stale even if replacement bandmates are easier to come by than replacement spouses. An impressive exception is Neil Young, who despite his affable demeanor there's little evidence is actually all that nice a guy, his certifiable genius enhanced by endurance alone. In pop/rock/whatever that's truly unusual. In jazz, where hard-earned technical skill counts for more and lasts better, lifers are far more common, and let's pause a moment to recall Wayne Shorter. But in pop, even when commercial success endures, the aesthetic excitement often seems staler and staler even for listeners who engage with the innovations or if you like fads pop records have somehow been generating for over a century.

[A] I've found that turning 80 had the effect of putting questions like this one--which Carola found touching and thanks you for--in the forefront of my mind. It definitely sharpens one's interest in mortality, as did, for that matter, Carola's 2017 cancer diagnosis, especially before we learned that while multiple myeloma can be fatal, it seldom kills quickly and doesn't necessarily kill at all. When we began that journey, each of us came to realize separately that he or she wanted to die first. That was clarifying and in a way gratifying. The problem with living let's not say forever so how about till 100 is that infirmity keeps creeping. What's passed off as "aches and pains" always hurts and often cripples, and if you have Alzheimer's in your family, as I do--my mom died of it at 89 and her father had some sort of dementia when he died at 83 in 1971--there's that worry whenever you can't remember who produced the Stones' Dirty Work, which at the moment I can't though I remember he boomed too much for the purists. I could go on, but I have work to do.

[A] The late Charlie Gillett's The Sound of the City was the seminal text. A lecture I gave on it is in Book Reports. The first volume of the late Ed Ward's The History of Rock & Roll is almost as good in its own way and benefits from hindsight. The back end of my first Consumer Guide book has two discographies, the album one way out of date but the singles one guaranteed dynamite. See also my Barnes & Noble piece "Ain't That a Shame," collected in Book Reports and on my site too.

[A] Absolutely I do. In a singer-songwriter like Swift, I as a listener am always most attracted to stories and turns of insight relevant to my own emotional life, which even as someone fortunate enough to have been happily married for half a century I nonetheless still reflect on quite a bit as I think about the joys and travails of friends, family, and humanity in general. Because I'm a popular music fan as well as critic, the megastar pop life also interests me and has inspired excellent music from the Beatles to Beyoncé. But although pure musicality is always crucial and sometimes decisive, the megastars who can reflect meaningfully or for that matter exuberantly or for that matter humorously on more generally relevant matters--friendship, pleasure, conflict, contradiction, loss, politics, social unrest, stuff I'm not clever enough to isolate off the top of my head here--are the ones who move me most and matter most to me. And musicality or no musicality, the travails of fame are usually a bore by me.

[A] It really doesn't work that way for me except insofar as giving any album an A plus is such risky business that I've done so less and less over the years. I've been grading records for so long that the 80 or so A records I find each year get there by kicking off a part of my brain that starts saying to me "Oh yeah, that's an A." Sometime that album will dip to B plus, other times it starts registering full A. But A plus is someplace else altogether. The reason I gave Beyoncé's Renaissance one last summer is that it had begun its life for me getting Bob-Carola-thanks-Nina through a traffic jam and remained our go-to car music for a week of driving around the Connecticut shore. As someone who stopped owning cars in 2006, that's not liable to happen to me again anytime soon. Though maybe I should have given that Selo i Ludi record one now that I think on it--to me it seems that resonant historically. Only, well, there were those two Rammstein covers.

[A] Kim is smarter if all too aware of it and her only solo rock record was way better than any of Thurston's, plus she didn't break up the marriage. But Thurston was the rock and roll heart of that great band, which badly needed one though Steve Shelley played a similar role. So by me they're equals--bandwise, anyway.

[A] It's on my site. Made my career well before Tom Wolfe included it in his The New Journalism collection. Never wrote anything else quite like it--it's so sparely Hemingwayesque, with an undeniable built-in ending.