About music he was rarely wrong, our old master, Barry Hannah, Mississippi boy who sometimes flew too close to the sun. He made me a mixtape, one time when I was faltering in life. Technically, it's not a true mixtape, the kind someone labors long over, casting repeatedly to haul in your soul like a hooked fish. It's just an average, old, scuffed Memorex, with "Songs That Got Us Through World War II—for Cynthia," scribbled on the spine in his stork-legged scrawl, a straight rip of the Rhino remaster of 1992, with some extra Harry James tacked on.

A review of two music books by Rachael Maddux: "Ellen Willis and Courtney E. Smith are both women who have written about being women and loving music and being women who love music. In this, they are rarities together, two female voices calling out in a field still, though less and less, dominated by male writers. They are also both fond of The Beatles. And that is just about where the similarities end."