(via Sean Albiez)

Age changes your perspective on everything, not just music. It would take a small book or long essay at least to discuss all that, but let’s say that some of the urgency and obsessive fixation inevitably fades away. You tend to have a better sense of proportion about things. When I wrote my early stuff, my life was empty in lots of ways. I was involved in relationships at various points, but the writing and the music took precedence. Nowadays my life is full – I’m a couple of decades into a marriage, I have two children. I don’t have the huge space of time or of emotional energy that I used to fill up with music-obsession. When you are young, music plays a major role in identity formation but as you got older, your identity is (hopefully) formed. You’re not looking to music to explain yourself to yourself, or be a savior, or the primary source of excitement and solace in your existence. Music remains my passion but it competes with other passions much more than it did when I was 22 and starting out as a music critic.

I also know a lot more about the history of music and have heard so much more, so things become more contextualized and perhaps I have sense of how cycles repeat in rock culture. By the age of 49 you’ve seen so many hype cycles kick off and then exhaust themselves. You are also less easily impressed. But that’s good I think - "SR, 2011