Rob Sheffield

The boy and the girl, together in electric dreams.

She leaned on me hard to buy a grave for myself; I guess she thought it would seem romantic.

Everybody knows what it’s like to drive while crying; feeling like a bad country song is part of why it sucks

I had no voice to talk with because she was my whole language. Without her to talk to, there was nothing to say.

Words I said out loud, every day, many times a day, for years and years—suddenly they were dust in my mouth.

night, I sat in the same chair in a different backyard, staring all night into different woods, except nothing I saw there had any good news to tell me about the future.

Another thing only country singers understand. One day, you’re in a physical landscape you share with this bizarre and fundamentally alien creature, not alien because she’s female but alien because you’re a fool in love and there’s nothing not alien about that. And then when she’s gone, you’re alone and all the strangeness and wonder have gone out of the landscape and you’re still a fool but now nobody notices how many days in a row you wear the same socks and cleaning the shower doesn’t make the girl smile anymore so everything smells a little worse and doesn’t get fixed when it breaks. Like Johnny Paycheck, I missed the feminine touch—not just hers, but mine.

But all the things you want to learn from grief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn.

I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together

man, all the people I get to hear this song with, we’re going to miss each other when we die.