"My first memories of music,

I'll name three big ones. This is before we even, like, discovered new wave and post-punk. So since I was a little kid, my mother played John Denver's Greatest Hits constantly. Three Dog Night, Greatest Hits, and The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Three very different genres, if you will. But that's first when I just absolutely fell in love with the Beatles."

"One bully was picking on him 

and picking on him and picking on him, and he had his Jeremy moment, you know, that the song from Pearl Jam. Yeah. And he lashed out and took care of the bully.  Left him pretty sore as well. And that's what these crazy kids did...and they made you angrier at the same time. And then maybe they made you tougher, but it also made you cold."

"Funny story, 

you know, you know this from growing up: we always celebrated St. Patty's Day because my mother embraced her Irish heritage. And so, a couple of years ago, I decided to do DNA testing to see what my genetics were.

And so you get the kit at home, and then you send it back and blah, blah, blah. So I get it back and lo and behold..."

"If there is a synth in a song

....new or old, and it catches my ear, I am going to love it!  I think the Beatles opened that doorway for so many bands, which led to sampling and different ways of recording.  There were so many styles and sounds in the Post-Punk, New Wave, and Dark Wave genres. Rap, Pop, Post-Punk, New Wave, etc., so many bands and groups created their magic with a Roland 808.  Those noisy Panasonic transistors contributed so much to the soundtracks of our lives."

"I was trying to impress her.

It snowed the day before. So there was slush and snow everywhere. Back then, our bicycles didn't have fenders.  So I went to our local drugstore and bought a single rose in a plastic box, a card, and a small box of chocolates. It was five bucks and change, which was still a lot for me at the time.  I put on a pink dress shirt to look nice and started riding to her house.  So I'm trying to balance everything on the bike while pedaling across a major highway.  And then..."

"They say we all project

 our own reality and accept it as truth.  In this case, my mom, who has been projecting her own reality quite forcibly, was accepted as truth by her children.  Reality or a delusional filter, my mom actually said she was in Vietnam.  Why and what role remained a mystery, until my daughter did the math..." 

"Why do you keep playing

the same song over and over again?  Maybe we are chasing those feelings from our youth.  Maybe because a lot of this music sounds as though it was just recorded this year.  Creativity is timeless.  New Wave and Post-Punk were so creative, so deep and complex that it still grabs you by the soul... many, many years later.  Compared to some hits today, these are the songs you'll be humming and singing even 50 years from now..."

"We were fortunate 

to have a dance club not too far from our neighborhood called Dance Park.  It allowed teens to enter between 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM.  It was there that we went from listening to the music from WLIR on our little radios to full blast at a real club.  Soda, chips, and the chance to dance next to a girl who used an entire bottle of Aqua Net made scrounging up $10 and a ride our weekly mission..."

"When we first heard the new wave 

magic pumping out of our staticy single-speaker cassette radios, sometimes the song that grabbed your ear was played only once or twice.  If you missed it, your options were limited: 1. Call the radio station...they never picked up.  2. Go to Sam Goody and sing it to the teenage clerk...who couldn't care less.  3. Approach the DJ booth at a club and hope he looked up and acknowledged your question while spinning two records."