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The cold quiet lull after the holidays is an unstoppable breeding ground for unfounded listlessness. There’s no judgment here. But there is a soundtrack for your mildly blue moments.

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The Sea And Cake is a shockingly dull band. All the band members must’ve gotten together and been like, “We want to make music that renders people unconscious. How do we do that?”

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The job of an interviewer is difficult: how to extract humanity from a person who spends hours being asked the same questions by dozens of people? How to get them to share something they wouldn’t share with any of these other people?

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I cringe when I think about how awful I was to my parents. How did they survive my cruelty? Here I was, the perfect little angel for 13 years, and then all of a sudden I’m living la vida Damien from The Omen.

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To really understand what’s at stake, you should know that You Are Free was instrumental in bridging a gap in between The Terrible Crap I Listened To Before The Internet, and The World Of Real Music With Meaning. So you should know that “He War” will cut me deep, exposing raw bone from an incarnation of myself long before I moved to New York City.

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Cat Power has never been known to be a ray of music sunshine (which is why it’s weird that she lives in Miami) but she went to some #dark places with The Covers Record in 2000.

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The criteria for this list is pretty basic: a good cover both honors the quality of the original song, as well as adds a level of nuance and individuality to it that justifies having done a cover in the first place, and any cover of a Beatles song has been disqualified on principle.

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Even though I find it ridiculous that Fran Lebowitz has been suffering from writer’s block for the past thirty years, it’s mostly just misdirected anger because her stuff is so good. Her book of essays are like little funny Jewish snacks for your brain.

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I hate the holidays. Not like, “Oh, I hate the holidays,” and then I go do it anyway. I mean it like, I do not do it. When the girl at the bookstore the day after Thanksgiving asked me, “Did you enjoy your Thanksgiving?” and stuffed my new copy of U-Turn: What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life? into a bag, I said, “I abstained.”