[A] I've gotten several questions like this, which gives me an opening to explain how my listening habits have changed since my wife Carola began contending with a cancer called multiple myeloma in late January. Both Carola's tolerance and Carola's ears have been a part of my criticism for 46 years. Not every living companion would put up with the ambient sound she does, and I treasure whatever responses she shares with me--as a glance at my site will establish, she's a hell of a critic herself, and I know no one who hears voices so acutely and imaginatively. Not that I blast music through the house whenever it's on in my office--we have speakers with separate controls in four of the seven rooms in our apartment (and I don't blast a lot anyway). But even then it's my preference to always have the music playing in the dining room/kitchen so that it's waiting whenever I venture out for a snack or to answer the doorbell. This was simpler when Carola had an office of her own in a neighbor's apartment--since that arrangement ended, I've been more careful about impinging on her mental space during the day. But her illness has not only made me far more cautious than that, it's cut into how much time I spend at home and how much time I spend working. Hundreds of hours of doctor's appointments, daily discussions of her symptoms and treatment options that I'm loath to undercut with aural distractions, and a lot more TV have all cut into my ear time--she needs my company, and I've never treasured hers more. Since September 26 Carola has been at Sloan-Kettering undergoing an autologous stem cell transplant and I've been up there six or more hours a day. The next phase of that treatment she'll be home, but weak and in need of sleep, and how that will affect my reviewing remains to be seen--for around a month she'll need to have me or a stand-in with her 24-7. So although I've gotten many requests to reevaluate old music, that's been something I could rarely manage as Xgau Sez got rolling (and once when I made an exception Carola got the Thompsons' "When I Get to the Border" stuck in her head and couldn't get it out). And now let me add one more thing. Carola will get better--multiple myeloma is considered incurable at present, but the afflicted go into remission for very long periods and her treatment has been going exceptionally well. Anyone who wants to pray or meditate or send out vibes, please do so. But one problem with having a serious disease is dealing with people who are worried about you--in my world, Carola is far more beloved than I am, as she should be. So unless you have special knowledge about multiple myeloma, your best wishes are assumed. And let me tell ya--after managing one two-day and one three-day getaway in 2018, in 2019 we intend to have some fun no matter who's on the fucking Supreme Court. What that will do to my work schedule remains to be seen.

[A] I've thumbs-upped only three Byrds albums--the greatest hits plus the country-leaning Notorious Byrds Brothers and the country-all-the-way Sweetheart of the Radio. This doesn't make me a Byrds fan--it makes me a Byrds skeptic, and if anything that skepticism has grown. Michael Clarke was a truly crap folkie drummer--I'll take crap folkie drummer Spencer Dryden or ham-fisted rock drummer Dewey Martin any day. I was at the Fillmore East when they introduced the Sweetheart material, which drew more boos than cheers from the Byrds fans despite my own vociferous support, and believe Chris Hillman made the right call to hitch up with the admittedly fickle Gram Parsons. So it's no surprise that I never once reviewed a Gene Clark record. Fact is, I do not recall No Other at all.

[A] Billie Holiday is probably my favorite singer. Al Green and John Lennon (yes, John Lennon) are the only competition that normally spring to mind when these discussions arise. So obviously I don't think anyone has matched her, and I find acolytes like Madeleine Peyroux kind of pathetic, decent and well-meaning though she seems. As for a compilation of Holiday's upbeat stuff, I know of no such consumer object, but it's a great idea: Bouncy Billie, or at the very least Bouncing. My nominations are "Them There Eyes" and "Your Mother's Son-in-Law." Of your three, unfortunately, I think only "What a Little Moonlight" a sure shot. That is the problem. She was much better at pop throwaways than the jazzbo elite believes. But her upbeat trifles are still pretty rare.

[A] As I thought I'd made clear in my reviews, I think what happened to Superchunk is that Mac McCaughan grew up. He stopped thinking slack motherfuckers were an apt marketing device. And he learned not so much to sing as to enunciate with some specificity and emote more legibly and, crucially, got more interested in tunes. Finally, in 2016, Trump convinced him that it was time to stop even hinting that life was but a joke. The first sign was his intense involvement in the Battle Hymns comp released the day Trump was inaugurated. And then came this year's What a Time to Be Alive. Key song: "Reagan Youth." Play it now, and listen to the lyric.

[A] Do you believe in torture? I oppose it myself. All these selections resemble the music Bush I's military enablers sicced on Noriega on account of he was a dictator (unlike such Bush faves as Pinochet, Somoza, Guzman) and also, er, controlled the Panama Canal. For that matter, limiting the selections to one is a species of torture. So not to cosset any kind of Islamic fundamentalism, let's start with anything by Rachid Taha. Then Youssou D'Dour's Egypt. Bassekou Kouyate's Jama Ko. Oumou Sangare's Worotan. Oruj Guvenc's Ocean of Remembrance. I could go on and won't. But for local color, let's include a Los Van Van best-of.

[A] I always wonder what music exactly got turned up to drown out Dr. Ford's protests--when BK got his buddy arrested at Yale, it was after a UB40 concert when a guy the drunk BK believed was that band's Ali Campbell refused his advances. More substantively, Ford's testimony brought to my mind Sam Phillips's dictum that the highest goal in recording is to capture the spontaneous one-of-a-kind moment. Even though she must have prepared for this public test of character, her performance before the cameras to an audience of millions seemed totally unscripted, from the head and the heart simultaneously--so quietly intelligent and so set on precision above all that it felt to me unprecedented, something the world had never seen before, credible in every detail to which she was ready to attest no matter what sexist bigots male and female are telling themselves. So to hell with the Prefect of Judea--the veritas is that in Maryland in the summer of 1982 a 15-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by two high school jocks. She wasn't an adventurer or experimenter. She may have been an outsider looking to grow up a little or widen her social circle. But there's not the slightest indication of the kind of sexual curiosity or status-seeking that does happen with young teenagers sometimes. She merely isolated herself from a smallish group to go to the bathroom and was physically forced to enter a bedroom. That's assault right there. Everything else is sexual assault.