“No problem. Just drop it back off before you go," he says, procuring a brass key. "And if he puts on Bowie's early stuff and starts sweet-talking, dammit, you run. You run as fast as you can.”

“Seth turns to Laney and I. "Three months ago, I'm in Detroit protesting a free trade conference, right? Some pig shoves me, I go flying into another, next thing I know I'm on the ground with a Taser in my back. I get thrown in city jail, no money and one phone call. So I call Jake. You know what this fucker did? He dropped everything, drove up and bailed me out, no questions.""Like I could just leave you," Jake says. "You're too pretty. You're a delicate flower. They would've ripped you apart in there.”

“It's the best kind of devastating there is. He took his pain and he turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that's what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you. What I'm trying to say is, it's just nice, I guess, knowing that someone else can put into words what I feel. That there are people who have been through things worse than I have, and they came out on the other side okay. Not only that, but they have made some kind of twisted, effed up sense of the completely senseless. They made it mean something. These songs tell me I'm not alone. If you look at it that way, music...music can see you through anything.”

“With technology and everything, compact discs are going to be, like, vintage soon, right? The way vinyl is now. Like, if I ever have kids, they’re going to look at CDs and think, ‘What is this crap, geez, how clunky.’ By then everyone will have the fiftieth edition of iPods—or maybe they’ll just have music downloaded directly into their brains, like with microchips, or something. And I’ll be the old lady in the corner going, ‘Back when I was a kid, we had mix tapes, and floppy disks, and gas didn’t cost twenty bucks a gallon, and oh, yeah, MTV actually played music videos, if you can believe it.’ And they’ll probably say, ‘Oh, Mom, you and your stories, we’re jetting to the oxygen bar, see you later,’ and take off in their flying cars. You know there’ll be flying cars, it’s only a matter of time.”

“Everything on the radio is crap...It's fast food for your ears. It doesn't make you think. It isn't even about anything - not anything real. Don't you think music should say something?”

“Jake shuts the van's back doors and lies down next to me. He's really close, so close I can feel him breathing on the nape of my neck. I could put more space between us, but instead I scoot backward, leaning into him, my back pressed into the pleasant warmth of his front. Jake holds his breath for a moment, but he doesn't say anything. And he doesn't move away.... He moves so his mouth is right under my ear, brushing the skin there, and one of his hands slides up, resting on my rib cage. My whole body tingles as he starts to sing softly into my ear.”

“She does know we're coming, right?' I ask.'Well...' He hems and haws a bit. 'Not exactly.'Laney immediately smacks the back of his head. 'Jake! You mean we're showing up unannounced? That is so rude!''What if she isn't there? What are we going to do?' I smack him once, too, for good measure. 'What is *wrong* with you?''Can we please stop with the abuse?”