“It's always that one song that gets to you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you.”

“The country singers understand. It’s always that one song that gets you. You can hide, but the song comes to find you. Country singers are alwaystwanging about that number on the jukebox they can’t stand to hear you play, the one with the memories.”

“When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free.”

“By the time you're an adult, you're used to seeing your friends disappear into their five-year plans. They drop out to get married, have babies, go to grad school, get divorced. They start a band or enter the penal system. They vanish for years at a time - some come back, some don't. Some of them you wait for and some you let go. Sometimes the only way they come back is in a song.”

“The radio tape puts you right back in the original time and place when you first heard the songs. You arethere, my friend.”

“But when you're a teenage boy, you can be narrow-minded about things that are girlie, things that are frivolous, things that are pop. Boys always want to be taken seriously, and they always want to transcend the tawdry emotion of the pop singer -- it's a fairly standard response to the rigors of young manhood... This isn't so different from how people talk about culture now. Rock epics are for boys; pop hits are for girls. When you're a boy, pop is scary because it's a maneater. You sing along with a pop song, you turn into a girl. That takes some degree of emotional risk.”

“I've played the song for a lot of people who respond, 'Hmmmm, this is interesting,' but in a way it's more like 'There are two exits in this room, the window and the door. If this song doesn't end soon, I'm going to opt for the window.”