Ron Rosenbaum’s book In Defense of Love defines love through science, literature, and popular culture in captivating ways.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“[I]n this impassioned offering. . .Even staunch skeptics will have their heartstrings tugged.”
In his own words, here is Ron Rosenbaum’s Book Notes music playlist for his book In Defense of Love:
My Playlist of ten of the saddest love songs
I love love songs, especially really sad love songs, and I hate to see their beauty– and that of love itself–disrespected by self-proclaimed “love scientists.” My book, In Defense of Love, is an argument for the indivisible power of love. Indivisible, yes, because, contrary to the claims of contemporary pop science, love cannot be “broken down” in a lab, divided into constituent molecular or subatomic particles that “love scientists” say it is supposedly composed of.
I think my love for sad love songs is in part a prose writer’s respect for songwriters, the enormously gifted singer-songwriters; as well as the awe and respect I have for love they conjure up and the beauty of the memories even sad love songs bring back.
And my contempt for the arrogance of the “love scientists” comes in part from my background as an investigative reporter who has focused on intellectual scandals (google my books on Shakespeare and Hitler scholars). Stupidity masquerading as knowledge upsets me and I enjoy exposing ignorance almost as much as I still get a thrill from the feeling of love– from being in love every day, even more, from staying in love and thinking of the person I’ve been in love with for nearly a decade now through the lens of the love in the love songs that celebrate that love. Sad love songs in particular serve to remind me of the sad fates I’ve escaped. The sadness of many (most?) great love songs, is a tribute, a celebration in a way of the beauty that once was and still is to be found in the haunted vaults of memory.
This is The Great Paradox of sad love songs: They can make you miserable with memory, BUT they can make you want more, not more misery but more love.
As for “love science” – would you know anything more about what the tragic exaltation of hearing a love song like Emmylou Harris’ “Boulder to Birmingham” or the Everly Brothers’ “Let it Be Me” felt like if you had a precision readout of the percentages of individual notes (say 11 per cent B-flat and 18 per cent C-sharp flat) they contained? Would that tell you what– and how– a love song made you feel? The nature of the INDIVISIBLE spell great love songs cast?
So, with that in mind let me begin my playlist (in no particular order) although the first one that came to my mind, that felt like an icepick to the heart, is this dangerously sad but beautiful Linda Ronstadt lament, “Long Long Time.”
1) “Long Long Time” by Linda Ronstadt
You’re a great actor, say, but even the greatest sometimes have trouble with one of the acting profession’s greatest challenges: crying on cue. Finding a way to summon up real, or genuine-seeming, deeply emotional tears on demand. Sometimes even the various Method Acting “Sense Memories” methods don’t work. But for others there is this song, “Long Long Time.”
Lock yourself in your dressing room, put on your earphones and as the Brits say “Bob’s your uncle” because the only thing more intense than real love is lost love. And, Linda Ronstadt told me once, that actors tell her there’s something about that lost love song that will give them that exquisitely lost and abandoned feeling and the wanted tears will be ready to flow on demand.
Why? Someone she loves with all her heart has rejected her and she knows she’ll never ever get over it.
‘”Cause I’ve done everything I know
To try and make you mine
And I think it’s gonna hurt me
For a long long time”
Just typing out this quatrain does it for me. It should be accompanied by some kind of Trigger Warning for potential listeners, for anyone who’s lost the love of their life.
2) “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley
Yes, it may sound strange to say that Elvis is an “underrated” artist. Sure he’s sold literally billions of records, but I think musical sophisticates tend to look down snobbishly upon the teen idol Elvis of “Love Me Tender,” “True Love,” “Can’t Help Falling” and forget what an electrifying emotional shocker, a breakthrough that revolutionized the culture that a song like “Heartbreak Hotel” was in its debut–and remains so every time you’re reminded of it. It was a firecracker, a grenade thrown into the placid white pop culture of the Fifties. It was a love song, yes, but a dark forlorn lost-love song.
“Well the bell hop ‘s tears keep flowing/
The desk clerk’s dressed in black/
They’ve been so long on lonely street/
They’ll never ever get back.”
Just listen to the way Elvis does that reverberating shimmering, shivering internal rhyme on “never ever” get back. He makes the space between the two words– never and ever– become an abyss of torment. Hasn’t been equaled since, though maybe copied without the shivering vision of a Becket like eternal hell of tragic sadness he gives it.
But my whole attitude toward Elvis changed from my earlier condescension when I went down in Memphis, to his Graceland mansion grounds to join the congregation of hardcore Elvis fans in that annual redneck Woodstock known as “Death Week”, doing a story about the commemoration of Elvis death, a wild pageant of Elvis fans, Elvis impersonators and weepy Elvis lovers and I decided to head over to the rickety old original Sun Studios headquarters where, under the aegis of genius pioneering rock impresario Sam Phillips who gave us Johnny Cash and all the rockabilly greats, Elvis first stepped up to a microphone and recorded such classics as “Heartbreak Hotel.”
That microphone: I discovered that (for fifty bucks) the Sun Studio managers would
give you a tattered lyric sheet, a mike the size of a wagon wheel would drop down from the ceiling, the original mike Elvis used, they said, and you could sing your heart out into it, your efforts recorded on the same primitive sound board, the original Sun sound engineers used to give Heartbreak Hotel that unique echoing cave-like reverberation.
I chose “Heartbreak Hotel” and paid special attention to the never-ever riff which fooled no one but the sound man who came out from behind the glass partition and handed me the CD of my performance congratulated me on “That beatnik thing you did,” referring to my “never ever” effort.
I beamed with pride. I felt close to The King.
3) “Boulder to Birmingham” by Emmylou Harris
This choice may come as a surprise to some because the song is not as well-known as, say, Linda R’s “Long Long Time.” But those who know it think it may equal if not surpass that one in pure melt-your-heart sadness. Most people believe it’s about the death of Emmylou’s close musical and (possibly) romantic partner, Gram Parsons, but the matter has been much debated although their duet on the Everlys’ woebegone ballad, “Love Hurts” is a loving embrace of voices akin to the radiance of molten gold and “Boulder to Birmingham” is believed by most to be an account of her fraught journey out to the scene of his death in a lonely motel room in California’s desolate Joshua Tree desert.
But there’s something many don’t know about Emmylou and sadness. Beneath her mastery of the sad ballads of human woe is a fascination with contemporary astrophysics and what you might call the stuff of cosmological musical sadness. In a phone interview with her a while ago she spoke to me of her excitement at the discovery that a “galactic cluster” an imaginable millions of light years away emitted a sound akin to a very, very, very sad B-flat, When I checked google I found several references like this: “In 2003, sound waves were detected in x-ray images of the hot gas surrounding the Perseus cluster. Their pitch is a B-flat, about 57 octaves below middle C making them the lowest frequency sound waves ever discovered. . .”
You can even hear a “sonification” of that blue note a million of times sadder than any human blues singer. Don’t ever say my girl Emmylou doesn’t know sadness.
4) “When Will I see You Again?” by The Three Degrees
It was either this trio of angelic voices or the Supremes “Some Day We’ll Be Together” which sounds more optimist on the surface but seems to conceal the same kind of despair at hope of reunion as the Degrees do.
Both songs despairingly ask the same question—when?—and neither offers much hope. Both express the way profound longing can lie beneath hope deferred or denied. Longing and the implicit recognition that the longing will be hopeless—last forever—at least that’s how I hear it. The Three Degrees song evokes memory made unbearable. Takes me back to the time and place I discovered the song, when I first came to New York and would console myself after romantic break ups with huge breakfasts at a tiny soul food cafe tucked away in the maze of Village streets called The Pink Tea Cup which had a massive 24/7 breakfast entry called “high on the hog” consisting of a mountain of scrambled eggs topped with savory pork chops with sides of buttered grits and biscuits, served by compassionate seeming waitresses in crisp pink uniforms, all of which conspired to lift the spirits despite the loss. But the real attraction of the place was the big old fashioned, fat and fabulous old style juke box stocked with obscure (to me) soul classics one of which was the celestial choir-like consolatory “When Will I See You Again” and the likes of the Four Tops “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted” (cheerful, huh?). But I aways brought a stack of quarters for tokens to keep it going, thinking, “maybe, just maybe she’s thinking like that about me” (almost never was) and we’d once again “share precious moments “as the Degrees put it (almost never happened). But the beautiful, blended voices of that angelic trio kept hope alive.
Do you ever read the comments under the You Tube versions of certain songs? You could say the YouTube Comments sections are the hot center of emotion in American culture. Here’s one I read from this Three Degrees song that actually motivated me into becoming a regular reader of these comments that sums up the function of the songs and their scores, hundreds, thousands sometimes over the course of many years that remain as living memorials to the music and the love that bonded them to those they once loved, a brief heartbroken paragraph: “How can one song take you through time, bring back the places, the smells, the voices, the people, fallen and standing, and make you happy and sad at the same time?”
I’ve now spent hours reading these comments, an education into life’s little tragedies that are of course not little at all to those who leave them. And how different songs evoke differing intensities and varieties of memories and the redemptive reawakening of unforgettable moments some of these songs afford. They are almost like their own niche genre of love literature across the spectrums of gender, race and age. I really recommend you check them out if you haven’t already.
5) “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” by Willie Nelson
Texas girls know: Willie the raucous outlaw country guy can also be Willie the crooner, the red headed double braided outlaw country Casanova of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” which they practically have you recite to get a Texas driver’s license.
And of course, there’s the apocryphal story of Willie engaged in a 9 hour Sting-like love session which Willie modestly disclaims by saying, “If that were true you’d think I’d remember the last 4 or 5 hours?”
But in his “Angel” song we learn what Willie’s like when the heartbreaker has his heart broken. Sad but kind and generous to a woman who’s been hurt, an angel whose metaphorical broken wings he willing to patch up with love—there’s his great line from, “Angel”—”love’s the only healer to be found.” Yet knowing and accepting that restoring her to wholeness through love might well mean giving her the strength to leave and find another destiny.
I have a special affection for “Angel” because in a way I patched it up. I spent a week on Willie’s tour bus hitting all the big beer hall and rodeo venues from Texas to Louisiana north to Nashville and Memphis having the time of my life, like I’d run away io join the circus and at some point picked up some gossip that one of those wicked Hollywood women Willie had a penchant for and had a penchant for him apparently, had broken his heart. Which was the genesis of the “Angel” song or had caused Willie to remove some key, all-too-personal lines from the song which made the sadness of loss unbearable. I found myself trying to convince Willie, with whom I’d become temporary buds so to speak, to let me glimpse the heartbreaking excisions, and to my surprise I eventually did get them from him and he agreed to restore them to one of the versions released.
I thought the missing verses were a missing part of music history by the Dylan or Sinatra of outlaw country. And if you really want to assess them yourself google my 12,000 word Vanity Fair portrait of Willie as he sadly sells his memories to appease the IRS.
Here’s a sample:
“The time we spent together—
The blinking of an eye.
But time stands still
When love wants to be found.
The world we built together,
Still spinning in the air
For angels flying too close to the ground.”
6) “Just My Imagination” by The Temptations
Why do I love this song so much despite what seems like its despairing ending? “Each day from my window I watch her as she’s walking by,” the Temps lead singer croons simply, “I think to myself I’m such a lucky guy” And then proceeds to tell us how great it is “to have a girl like her” for several moonstruck verses until at the end reality crashes in and he admits, “But it was just my imagination, runnin’ away with me” Sad, right? A really sad deluded-guy song.
But look at it another way: “Just my imagination” is an ode to the Crush! The crush—often derided, dismissed as superficial, even juvenile compared to “real” love. But you could also say there is rarely any “real love” that is not preceded by a crush, however brief, and imaginary—unless you’re one of Shakespeare’s fools who believes in love at first sight. A crush can be frustrating, but it can also be beautiful, a study in the appreciation of the imagined lover that brings his or her qualities into greater focus—to more vibrant life. A means of discerning whether a potential lover is right for you, has any ACTUAL interest in you before you invade their personal space or become an unwanted stalker. I know I’ve had many crushes, by contrast few true—reciprocated—loves. Also forgotten is that women can have crushes as often or more, or so they tell me. My current beloved of double-digit years together has told me she had a “massive crush” on me before I had any idea I was worthy of her attention.
She’d read something I’d written about Tolstoy’s wife that ended up in my new book,
(did I mention it, IN DEFENSE OF LOVE). That was how our love affair began although because we lived in different cities and didn’t get to see each other often at first it took me two years before I had the courage to ask her for a kiss for fear of rejection. Such bravery, but I needed to know it wasn’t “just my imagination, runnin’ away with me” because I didn’t want to find out that was the case. (Read my book, it could happen to you!) My point is crush-like attention can be a way of learning attentiveness, all the ways someone can make oneself a candidate for “real love”. I think the Temps knew that. These guys were Smooth in the best non phony way. This song has a lot to teach us. For one thing life is what happens between crushes until the final one.
I think of this song as a beautiful, tough, often sad tribute to The Crush. The crush so often ending up in tears if it even gets you close enough to matter. Or to flatter. It’s true I’m told that there are some deplorable people who encourage the false hope of those fixated on them crush-wise for the sake of flattery. Shame, shame, although I’d sometimes prefer false hope to no hope. The Crush: not ‘real love’ they say. But a prerequisite to real love, I think. If your imagination doesn’t have the death-defying nerve that makes a crush bearable then it will rarely flourish into love. It will die and lie on the lawn like the early dead leaves of autumn.
And so, so smoothly, the Temps usher you into Crush world.
At what point do you know it’s all a lie or do you deliberately enter the portal of romantic dream denial? When do you know it’s “just my imagination, runnin away with me”. Yes, but runnin’ with your runnin’ feet not touching the ground. Must a crush be crushed if it’s a no-hoper? I guess there should be a guide, a rulebook for how to disengage from a crush without crushing the crushee. That kind of advanced diplomacy is almost always difficult, impossible not to leave hurt feelings because no one wants to be disposed of, however gently.
I called my book “In Defense of Love” but there is another book I could have written “In Defense of the Crush.” You’ve heard of “courtly love”, all you medieval scholars and fellow English majors out there who have read up about the 6 century-old rules of courtship, devised by the Provencal lyricists, aka “courtly love”. Yes, it often mandated that it be confined to longing, adulterous chastity, and writing poetic tributes to the princesses who financially supported the writing of tributes to themselves, tributes never to be consummated except in imagination and rhyme. Rules often I suspect, as Shakespeare put it, “honored more in the breach” (dirty pun intended by WS) not just in the imagination. Imagination. I sometimes think the double nature of love’s sadness—with its often-false hope promise (hope springs eternal but false hope does too) has never been better portrayed than by this Temptations song. Falling in love almost requires failing at love. The sadness of knowing, just knowing, she or he is not meant to be forever for you. That your crush was never meant to last, but the next one might be. Don’t give up imagining.
*You know I should mention that I’m also a fan of the Stones cover of “Just My Imagination”.
Maybe because Mick switches out the lyric to say,
“Out of all the girls in NEW YORK/
She’s in love with you”
7) “September When it Comes” by Rosanne Cash (a duet with Rosanne’s still vibrant dying father, the great Johnny Cash)
Rosanne herself can be a searing solo singer-song writer (Check out “The Seven Year Ache” and “That’s How We Make a Broken Heart”). And yes it’s true I did once find myself in such a daze of admiration for Rosanne after I attended a solo performance in the Village, I devoted one of the columns I was writing at the time to a light hearted mock “marriage proposal” to her. (Despite her being happily married). What prompted such an extreme gesture (that’s all it was) was the heartbreakingly beautiful way she closed that show. After several ovations and encores she did a version of that song from “My Fair Lady” the one that begins with “All I want is a room somewhere/Far away from the cold night air…” The one that ends with “Now wouldn’t it be loverly, loverly, loverly…” And she strung out the “loverlies” into a plaintive crescendo and de crescendo that was unimaginably loverly. Maybe you had to be there but I WAS there and it was magical. It knocked me and my date into another, better, world, faraway yes. Farther away than any cold night air could ever touch us, Ever.
The mention of other worlds reminds me that like Emmylou, Rosanne follows developments in cosmology. She was friends with the lead singer of a local New York rock band, The Eels, whose father was a Princeton physics professor who was instrumental in developing the “many worlds” or “multiverse” theory of subatomic physics, (google my Smithsonian profile of Rosanne). What is it with these female singer songwriters and cosmological physics? I haven’t heard of any male singers who were up on the subject. Maybe it’s that some women are adept at figuring out an even more complex mystery to solve: the minds of men).
Anyway, I wrote my mock marriage proposal, published it in the New York Observer and held my breath for a week hoping she wouldn’t reply offended and/or snarky. When in fact the letter she wrote to the Observer publisher was so gracious and witty.
Her response: “I plan to put Ron Rosenbaum’s ‘marriage proposal’ in a prominent place in my living room and should my husband ever show signs of taking me for granted I will let him know I have other options.”
The quote from her letter was the essence of kindness to a besotted fan who will forever be grateful for the gesture. And maybe in another world. . .
And here’s a few powerful lines from Johnny Cash in “September” who, like Rosanne, has made this world a better place. You know what September is a metaphor for, right?
“I plan to crawl outside these walls/
Close my eyes and see/
And fall into the heart and arms/
Of those who wait for me/
I cannot move a mountain now/
I can no longer run/
I cannot be who I was then/
In a way I never was…”
If you ask me Johnny Cash can still move mountains.
8) “Girl from the North Country,” “I Threw it All Away,” “If You See Her, Say Hello” by Bob Dylan
In a way these 3 songs could be considered ONE song—separated into parts by years—in which Dylan explores the torment, the regrets and remorse of lost love. In each of these three songs we find Dylan torn, teetering on the edge, the ledge that divides regret and remorse, I used to say Dylan owns regret because so many of his songs summon up the sadness of the past. But lately I’ve been wondering if I should fine tune that to make the distinction between regret and remorse more clear. Do you think there’s a difference? I feel that remorse is more moralistic, self-accusatory. Regret—something bad happened between us. Remorse—I brought the bad thing on myself.
In “North Country” from a very early album, you sense he’s asking as delicately, decorously tentatively as possible, through an intermediary, if the ashes, are still warm, the embers still glow. He doesn’t know if he should kindle them again.
In “I Threw It All Away,” there’s no doubt he thinks of himself as a jerk:
“I must have been mad/
I never knew what I had/
I threw it all away,”
And then in “If You See Her” a kind of answer song to the other two, he seems to want to have it both ways. To be remembered and forgotten: both potentially painful. But in that song, “If You See Her” there is an amazing verse, overlooked I think but perhaps a flash of Dylan’s heartfelt undisguised truth. Maybe the most pure profession of love in all of Dylan:
“And though our separation/
It pierced me to the heart/
She still lives inside of me/
We’ve never been apart”
Whoa, she still lives inside of me! It’s almost as if he’s giving up—for a moment at least—his singularity, the very integral distinctive, solo-self he’s treasured, to merge with her forever. They could be 5 or 500 miles apart physically but NO distinction metaphysically. “Never apart.” Of couse it’s Dylan, so what he gives he takes away. In the next verse he suddenly adopts a Mr. Cool persona. Now it’s—I could take her or leave her. “Tell her she can look me up/If she has the time” Is that just a mask to hide how scary Never Apartness is?
You be the judge.
9) “Love Hurts” by The Everly Brothers
Here are the mystifying opening lines of “Love Hurts”
“Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and mars/
Any heart not tough nor strong enough/
To take a lot of pain, take a lot of pain/
Love hurts/
Love hurts.”
“Wait a minute this CAN’T be an Everly Brothers song,” was my first reaction after listening to
“Love Hurts” for the first time in a “long long time” as Linda Ronstadt might put it. First time ever? I know that’s not true, but maybe I’ve superstitiously avoided it for fear of the foreboding title.
It is the antithesis of SOME OF their greatest songs which tell of the redemptive power of love. I’m talking about supernal trilogy as I think of it: “Let It Be Me” (not ignoring the superb soulful cover by Betty Everett and Jerry Butler which is a knockout), “Devoted to You” of which there are many versions of this quietly beautiful ballad (James Taylor anyone? If he hasn’t done it, he should asap), and finally “All I Have to Do is Dream” (take your pick, maybe Jimmy Clanton’s plaintive pure country version).
But “Love Hurts”: uh uh, it’s so unremittingly harsh—”wounds, scars, mars”.
I really felt I needed an answer. So, I turned to the song writers of “Love Hurts,” and I discovered a fascinating, though still mysterious, love story behind it all.
The story goes that one night in 1933 an 8-year-old Milwaukee girl named Matilda Scaduto had a dream. A dream of the face of a man so memorable she later said she decided she was going to spend the rest of her life searching for him. Cut to 1945. Nineteen-year-old Matilda is an elevator operator in Milwaukee’s grand Hotel Schroeder. A traveling musician and songwriter, Georgia-born Boudleaux Bryant is playing a gig with a travelling band called “Hank Penny and His Radio Cowboys”. The minute Matilda sees him she says, “THAT’s HIM” the face
from my dream. Five days later they elope and get married. He decides to call her “Felice”.
The married couple and songwriting partners went on to be credited for more than 6000 songs together, including many for The Everly Brothers.
Although credit for the songs is usually ascribed to the brilliant husband/wife songwriting team responsible for those three tributes to the beauty of love, WRITING CREDIT is split with (I believe) just two Everlys songs. “Love Hurts”—sole credit given to Boudleaux—while sole credit is taken by Felice for “All I Have To Do is Dream.”
Hmmm. One doesn’t have to be Columbo to suspect, somebody strayed.
Why the discrepancy?
Of course, yes, also, if you wanted to be all cynical, you could think of “Felice”, as a smooth operator, not just an operator of elevators—she spied this good looking music man traveling the country appearing only briefly in her hometown and cannily seized the moment and told him he’d appeared in a dream when she was an eight-year-old and at last she found him. Could have been flattering to him whether it was true or she made it up by the time the lift got to his floor. Or he knew he was being scammed but played along as if stunned because she was, um, cute. They were both knowingly going along with the imaginary dream fantasy thinking they were tricking each other, I see a Hollywood rom com.
Did Boudleaux stray and write the song out of hurt contrition when Felice threw him out (at least temporarily)? Or did Felice give him reason to feel hurt, in retaliation for his bad behavior—the possibilities are many—and denied him their customary shared credit for “Love Hurts” and insisted on taking credit for “All I Have To Do is Dream” for herself, her defiant response to his hurting her—a song that says, in effect, “I can get someone else. All I have to do is dream.” It all reminds me of the title of Raymond Carver’s famous short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”.
ADD Kicker:
All we know is “Love CAN hurt.
10) “Any Day Now” and “I Don’t Wanna Cry” by Chuck Jackson
My guess is you probably haven’t heard of Chuck Jackson. He never was a big star. I think of him as the forgotten soul singer of the Sixties. Even now his hardcore fans are mostly in the UK. The only major obituary I’ve found (he died in 2023 at 85) was in the UK Guardian, but it was a good one, appropriately respectful. Here’s the lead: “Chuck Jackson was a matinee idol among his generation of soul singers in the early 1960s, displaying the looks and the bearing to match the elegance of his singing. He shared with such contemporaries as Ben E King, Jerry Butler and Lou Johnson an understated masculinity that would be lost in the subsequent decade, with the arrival of grunting sex machines and smooth ‘love men’. Jackson infused the songs he recorded with deep emotions made all the more powerful by the restraint of his delivery.”
I’m the type of guy who will buttonhole strangers (well almost strangers) to get them to listen to music I love. For years ever since I heard those two songs “I Don’t Wanna Cry” and “Any Day Now” I’ve been trying to get people I know who are into music to give at least those two a listen. I think they’re an almost perfect fusion of soul and rock and insanely catchy. It’s not just me. Here’s a guy in the YouTube comments on “I Don’t Wanna Cry”
@macyprimm7201 1 year ago “Memories, my grandmother told me when I wasn’t more then 3 years old, I would sit on the stairs with my eyes closed singing this song Rest In Heaven Granny, Mama and Mr. Jackson”
I was bit older when I first heard them, but those two songs have that power over me. These two Chuck Jackson recordings are rare and unique oxymorons: the feel-good sad soul song. I feel if I could get people on this site to give them a listen my life will not have been wasted.
So I’d like to say thank you to those who are on the same wavelength as me by recommending yet one more song—another kind of rarity: the gratitude ode. Sam and Dave’s totally ecstatic “I Thank You”.
My thanks to all the Largehearted people who made doing this list and meditating on these songs such a real pleasure and learning experience.
Ron Rosenbaum is the author of seven books including The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler. In addition, he has written many articles for periodicals including Harpers, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and Smithsonian as well as columns for Slate and The New York Observer. He has interviewed many singers and musicians from Bob Dylan to Linda Ronstadt and Rosanne Cash.