Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life Quotes

“It's like this when you fall hard for a musician. It's a crush with religious overtones. You listen to the songs and you memorize the words and the notes and this is a form of prayer. You attend the shows and this is the liturgy. You're interested in relics -- guitar picks, set lists, the sweaty napkin applied to His brow. You set up shrines in your room. It's not just about the music. It's about who you are when you listen to the music and who you wish to be and the way a particular song can bridge that gap, can make you feel the abrupt thrill of absolute faith.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“This is what songs do, even dumb pop songs: they remind us that emotions are not an inconvenient and vaguely embarrassing aspect of the human enterprise but its central purpose. They make us feel specific things we might never have felt otherwise. Every time I listen to "Sunday Bloody Sunday," for instance, I feel a pugnacious righteousness about the fate of the Irish people. I hear that thwacking military drumbeat and Bono starts wailing about the news he heard today and I'm basically ready to enlist in the IRA and stomp some British Protestant Imperialist Ass, hell yes, bring on the fucking bangers and mash and let's get this McJihad started.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“The connection being that in my head all language began in song and that the best stories inevitably reutrn to song, to a state of rapture. For years, I had assumed that throwing beautiful words at the page would make my prose feel true. But I had the process exactly backward. It was truth that lifted the language into beauty and toward song. It was a matter of doing what Joe Henry did, of pursuing characters into moments of emotional truth and slowing down. The result was a compression of sensual and psychological detail that released the rhythm and melody in language itself, what Longfellow called "the happy accidents of language.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less previous in the bargain. I don't want to confuse artistic and commercial value, but it's just a fact that some kid who rips an album for free isn't going to give it the same attention he would if it cost him ten bucks. At what point does convenience become spiritual indolence? I realize this makes me sound like an old fart, but sometimes I get nostalgic for the days when the universe of recorded sound wasn't at our fingertips, when we had to hunt and wait and - horror of horrors - do without, when our longing for a particular record or song made it feel sacred.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“This was one of those mid-thirties moments when you take a look at the stale, half-chewed bagel your life has become and kiss jealousy on its smokey mouth.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“When people bitch about the death of the vinyl LP as a medium (and lord knows they bitch) what they’re mostly lamenting is the death of this kind of listening. Music as a concerted sonic experience, rather than the backing track to a flashing screen. What”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“All language is an aspiration to music.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“We live in a society that puts a high premium on success and I learned, mainly through my dad, that salvation would come through success, and I carried that into my adult life and it’s a total lie.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“Rock and roll allowed people to lie about themselves, and to be sanctified for the extravagance of their fictions. This”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“Hey, Dad, check this out!” Ike stared at the boy. He clearly wanted to be down there watching his kid possibly crack his skull open, rather than recording a song about how frightened he was that his kids might crack their skulls open.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“More than any single issue, Gil’s essential topic was America, how the nation had fallen away from its moral precepts and into ruin, a condition of spiritual malaise that would eventually deliver us the bigotry and psychotic greed of the Bush Era.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“It’s the reason we become enamored of certain singers, I think, because they project the voice we wish to summon within ourselves. His”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“The record is not simply a storage device. Its value resides in the particular set of memories and emotional associations held by its owner. These are inseparable from the physical object, which is no longer a physical object but an article of faith.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“If you’re wondering if you’re a collector, ask yourself two questions. Do I own too many records? Do my friends and family feel I own too many records? If your respective answers are No and Yes, you’re a Collector.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“I myself despise “Macarena,” and yet I have been humming it for the past three days and my two-year-old daughter is now humming it and I’m pretty sure she will never stop.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less precious in the bargain. I”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“it was off to the library, where people went before God invented the Internet and”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“music came before anything else, before language and large-scale war and liquid soap, and because music is the one giant thing America has done right, amid all it has done wrong. Music, that ancient and incorruptible bitch.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“But here’s a little secret, between you, me, and the rest of the mall: buying shit isn’t enough. What we wish for in our secret hearts is self-expression, the chance to reveal ourselves and to be loved for this revelation, devoured by love. And thus, most of us go about our duties of commerce and leisure in a state of perpetual longing, with nocturnal excursions into the province of despair.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“Boyle looked like a Monty Python in drag. Then she opened her mouth and this epic noise came ripping out of her. Within a week, she was the most celebrated person on earth, an”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“Styx has become the mullet of bands.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“In fact, I'm willing to argue at this point that we are all Drooling Fanatics, that every single human being carries within him or her the need for music and that we differ only in matters of degree and expression.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“There is no sin in the realm of taste.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us

“Misery loves another idiot with a jukebox where his soul should be.”
― Steve Almond, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us