[A] With an artist as gifted as Rodrigo, predicting the future is difficult to impossible, although it is worth noting, as she does in the notes to Guts, that she works with an experienced collaborator named Daniel Nigro who it's safe to assume transformed at least a few good songs into great ones. Also worth remembering is that thus far she's been free to write as something approaching what she is: a remarkable young woman whose professional life and love life are both bound to become more complicated, with who knows what effect on the songs she writes except that just because the writing has been so consistent up till now a few unresolved twists and complication or for that matter some sort of satisfactory resolution or turmoil in her romantic interpersonals likely awaits her, with unpredictable effects on her art itself--although just because she's so talented it's not at all impossible that her next bunch of songs at least will be more complex and unexpected than is within our power to anticipate.

[A] As a general matter, there's nothing morally wrong about cannibalizing a great song for a commercial, and yes I said cannibalizing. A lot of musicians feel they don't get paid enough for their work, and many of them have a point. So I don't even think twice about it, which may be why I can't even cite a relatively offensive example. A gravity knife? A Kid Rock Trump anthem? A conspicuously pricey timepiece? An AK-47? Some oxygen-sucking SUV I can't even name?

[A] Critics do not make meaningful money from their books if they're lucky enough to have a few, and this applies especially to criticism per se--bios and to a lesser extent historical studies are somewhat different. Also, like all writers critics want to be read, to have their carefully honed analyses and opinions be a part of public discourse so that guys like you can share them or elaborate them. Hence I didn't think twice when my old friend and in some respects protege Tom Hull made the tremendously generous offer to create a website for me back in 2001, which I should mention now includes 24 years of Consumer Guides that have never achieved book form. If he hadn't, and if Wikipedia hadn't gleefully cited and sometimes cannibalized it, I wouldn't be making a remarkably decent living on Substack, which at least for the nonce I am. A fulltime writer at 81. I'm very fortunate.

[A] I think my most important gift as a critic is how intensely, variously, and most important voraciously I respond to music. That said, it's far more common for such responses to be enhanced and intensified by analyzing and listening critically, a process generally jump-started by what begins as more casual or incidental enjoyment. But the opposite certainly happens sometimes--I come to realize that I've been attracted only to a single song or two, or even that I've gotten tired of or seen through the track that initially pulled me in.

[A] This is a hypothetical so implausible--forget Trump, what about "formed a committee"?--that it's not worth answering except to point that out. I suppose you could posit a situation in which his opponent was heinous in some way, but whatever the Dems' limitations that's not plausible either. And in any case, my politics are my own, which doesn't mean they won't inevitably be affected by the neverending flow of new information that can come from anyone. I read more about politics online than I do about music.

[A] Only occasionally do I even listen to rerecordings or remasters, and almost never do I write about them. These niceties may well matter to the artists, but they're also profit-takers pure and simple that tend so marginal aesthetically that except in jazz, where improvisation counts for so much, I just feel like I have better things to do with ears that work 12-18 hours a day. Maybe what I assume about Swift is obvious; maybe it's even public knowledge. I just haven't cared enough to poke around about it. But I assume that her primary reason for those rerecordings is economic, not artistic--a way to combat the sale of her catalog out from under her nose. But I will also say that having raved about her as long ago as 2008's Fearless, I personally have found Swift's recent songs of solid quality but at the same time somewhat more predictable and/or fame-specific, hence less than compelling.

[A] I've streamed the new PJ maybe four-five times, which isn't to claim front-to-back by the way, without feeling inclined to forget about it quite yet. But that's mainly because I respect the artist as much as I do. This is PJ Harvey, after all. That said, so far it hasn't passed either of my two tests: 1) Do I want to play it again just to hear it? 2) Am I ever actively and consciously enjoying what I'm hearing on some purely aesthetic level? Not as of now. The Simon, which I purchased on the grounds that it was Paul Simon after all, failed both tests, so I'm not reviewing it. I'm giving PJ the month off and will check it out again before January is over.

[A] I read a lot of reviews and hear many more albums than I write about. I also have advisors de facto or otherwise--my editor Joe Levy most of all, after that my sister Georgia and my daughter Nina and my webmaster Tom Hull. But I talk music with most of the people I know and will take a likely-sounding tip from anyone.

[A] Louis Armstrong's 16 Most Requested Songs. Later, Kind of Blue. Maybe Dave Brubeck's Jazz Goes to College. And jazz aside, by all means get him started on the Beatles. Sgt. Pepper, why not?

[A] With insufficient space and ever-increasing difficulty. Any intellectual my age has to start pondering how to dispose of his library, but usually those faced with that ever-expanding dilemma aren't also working full-time. I am. That said, it's high on my to-do list and may even be something I want to write about. And I should add that as I've indicated before here, I much prefer physicals, especially CDs--in part because they're simple to stick a bunch in a changer for an informal compare-and-contrast but also because, just as with e-books versus printed books, I find listening to streamed music different psychologically from putting CDs in a changer. In both cases I'm old enough to be somewhat disoriented by its lack of materiality.

[A] I don't know enough young people to comment on how much therapy they do except to wonder how they pay for it. Maybe things are different in socialized Canada, but here in NYC it can cost plenty. That said, I know plenty of people who've done therapy, count one therapist an old friend, and have written about my own experiences with therapy in Going Into the City. One shrink played a minor but key role in my decision to set my sights on a relationship with none other than Carola Dibbell, while another was in our lives when Carola and I had a crisis in 1980 and certainly did me more good than the marriage counselor we consulted did the two of us. Then again, the NYU-linked therapist Carola consulted for free in the early '70s was such a key figure in her life that he's the focus of her strange, poignant, funny, highly recommended short story "Surviving Death." Carola gets free counseling as part of her so far successful treatment for multiple myeloma and also consults a therapist who specializes in counseling writers who gets a thank you she deserves in the acknowledgments to The Only Ones.

[A] I do not own The Definitive Collection but wasn't wildly impressed by the not-all-that-extended "Heat Wave" when I found it on Spotify, which is too bad because Carola adores "Heat Wave," which appeared around when she was beginning her sophomore year in college and--along with the Beatles, natch--reconverted her to rock and roll. (She had a jazz phase that has served her well for decades without cutting into her rock and roll fandom. When I asked whether it wasn't maybe "Dancing in the Streets" that so impressed her she stuck with "Heat Wave." "It's my favorite song," she said indignantly. "It's everybody's favorite song.") Me, I'm not such a big Reeves fan, partly because while finally purchasing a couple of LPs I adore to this day I also bought her Dance Party, which definitely didn't hold up against The Beatles' Second Album or The Rolling Stones Now. Not only that, but my fave '60s ur-Motown album is The Marvelettes' Greatest Hits, purchased in 1969 or maybe 1971, I still remember finding it in a bin in Berkeley. Motownwise, Reeves got the shaft as the Supremes took over the label, not least because she was bizwise enough to nurture big ambitions that sat poorly with Berry Gordy, who was more bizwise by a considerable margin. In my view her voice was just big enough to justify dreams of taking her pop legit. By the time I was getting records in the mail I recall getting a solo debut from here, maybe the Richard Perry production Nelson George references in his Motown book Where Did Our Love Go? For sure she had a bigger voice than Diana Ross or Gladys Horton of the Marvelettes, but that's never enough. The album was a dog.

[A] One of the more depressing things about spending your life as a critic is haters who should probably avoid criticism because disagreement sits so poorly with them. Many of these people are just stupid, but Petersen doesn't seem to be--his syntax is fine, and sometimes he thinks I'm "interesting." He just loves Wilco so much that the fact that a name critic doesn't share his full-bore enthusiasm drives him mad. You'd think to read this aggrieved fan's hate mail that I'd panned all of Wilco's albums when in fact only one of my nine repeat nine reviews is negative. The problem with the others, presumably, is that they're not positive enough--one A minus, two B plusses, three three-star Honorable Mentions, one two-star, one one-star. In addition they collaborated on an album I love, the Billy Bragg-enhanced not to say -dominated Woody Guthrie tribute Mermaid Avenue. But going back to Uncle Tupelo I've always thought Tweedy was overrated as both a singer and a songwriter and explained why in prose I can guarantee wasn't "lazy" because I know how hard it is for me to put sentences together.

[A] My basic method is the one I've used since I started listening to the radio in my own room when I was 12: have music playing all the time and see what attracts your attention. By "all the time" I mean something less absolute, of course--only when I've lived alone has it been literal, and from the beginning there was often baseball vying for my attention, and seldom did I do both at once. But all the preceding assumes I'm living alone when for the past half century I've cohabited with a woman who I'm forever milking for offhand opinions. If she likes it I almost certainly do or will. But that only happens when she's not working herself--more often we have to negotiate so she's not distracted by my sounds, and for years she got to rent her own work space in a friend's apartment upstairs (which she still misses). All that said, absolutely once I've determined that a record pleases me on a casual basis I hone in on it, generally playing it five or 10 times and making sure I catch every lyric. I don't think the kind of listening many fans do requires that kind of attention. But if the music is to your taste it will repay it.

[A] JFK became president by barely defeating Richard Nixon, who even in 1960 seemed like the amoral menace his eventual presidency proved him to be. Kennedy's never fully explicated assassination suggested that despite the Bay of Pigs disaster he was regarded as a dangerous agent of change by the forces of evil, plus he projected a youthful vigor and gathered an impressive liberal brain trust around him. Hence his legend, which while it wasn't justified by his actual achievements as of November 1963 is rightly associated with what LBJ soon accomplished as his de facto political heir, in particular the Civil Rights Act and then Medicare. True, Vietnam took root on JFK's watch as well, and while I suspect he would have done better with it than LBJ, how much better cannot be known. That said, though, RFK did become genuinely antiwar, which to me indicates that JFK would probably have taken a less hawkish path though who can know for sure? What is clear is that RFK's own antiwar feelings were genuine. Without having the expertise to vouch for its unconventional details, I recommend the "investigative poetry" of Ed Sanders's Broken Glory: The Final Years of Robert F. Kennedy (which also has plenty of alarming stuff on the MLK assassination). RFK Jr., however is clearly a menace and has been since he went on the Covid-period anti-vax crusade many other Kennedys have condemned.

[A] My main motivation was to establish a critical consensus like any other critics' poll. Not that such a consensus is definitive, but it's certainly informative as regards both the critics and the art form they cover, plus it was a standard journalistic circulation-booster that filled a gap left by the departure of a mag called Jazz & Pop, and clearly that gap needed filling. In addition I thought that, as with "Dean of American Rock Critics," Pazz & Jop was a handle that might attract some attention on its own. A hook, we call that in the music biz. Like the blatantly obvious "Consumer Guide," this one definitely worked.

[A] O'Connor was obviously a bit of a skyrocket. She peaked early and never seemed to regain her equilibrium, insofar as she ever had any. Her voice was so remarkable it carried her, pretty much, through an uneven and occasionally unhinged career powered in part by an active and admirable but not especially consistent or persuasive social conscience. I hadn't put her on in years when she died, played Do Not Want a little, and moved on. But it's worth noting that a week ago Carola and I were visited by an intellectually ambitious grandniece with an active interest in music who'd just graduated from college. An hour or two into our colloquy she asked me what I thought of Sinead, who she'd been playing and felt like hearing again. So I dug out a CD. In that context, I thought O'Connor sounded great.

[A] Not many, and if you don't count Chinese Americans, just one: Cixin Liu and Ken Liu's The Three-Body Problem, clearly a work of genius though it didn't blow my mind to the extent others report. Counting Chinese-Americans, start of course with Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, which is more novelistic than it pretends. Liked Eugene Lim's Dear Cyborgs and even more Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown. Not crazy about Ling Ma's Severance. Highly recommend the long China section of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, and the Chinese protagonist of his Red Moon.

[A] C'mon, Victor, try harder. As a rock fan in a secondary market, that is your lot, a demographic inconvenience you're doomed to cope with. THIS PECULIARITY I ADDRESS AT LENGTH IN THE FULL-LENGTH COLUMN ON PLACEBO I PUBLISHED ON OR AROUND MY 64TH BIRTHDAY, WHICH YOU MISSED WHY?? It's easily finable from the Placebo page in the digitized Consumer Guide. I'm listening to Meds as I write, probably for the first time since I wrote that column, though I did keep their best-of, which inconveniently enough came out during the part of 2013 when there was no CG and which sounded excellent when I played it. Meds also sounds pretty darn good in more or less the way I describe. Tuneful, rockin', smart enough. But just for the record, for an artist to admire the artists you list is no guarantee that he, she, or they will approach the excellence of those aesthetic models. It's to Brian Molko's credit that he came as close as he did.

[A] I have both those albums on vinyl and liked them fine in their moment, bypassing them for review, as you figure, because I didn't do imports back then. Reconsidering them as CDs might be fun, although I note that Amazon is currently selling what seem to add up to 18 Johnny Thunders/Heartbreakers bootlegs-I-presume, some CD and some vinyl, a plethora that diminishes the fun potential of sorting them out considerably. In my recent David Jo appreciation I came up with the adjective "squalling" to describe Johnny's sound, and the same word popped into my mind unbidden as I considered your query. A good start descriptively.