Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears

"The question of what exactly we remember when we listen to old recordings, or whether it can be called remembering at all, becomes less and less answerable over a lifetime."

Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears

"I learned that the day "The Viper's Drag" slipped from between my fingers. But whatever might be lost or broken or forgotten is nothing compared to the miraculous rebirth that occurs every time the needle hits the groove. Here is Fats Waller Himself, not dead but present, so present that he overwhelms the well-ordered precincts of the living room. The sound sprawls. What vibrates here has more life than any room."

Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears

"Scattered among these things are reminders that sound once existed: a metronome, a drumming pad, a guitar pick, a trumpet mouthpiece, a music stand, a tuning fork, a block of rosin...The older instruments bear the marks of those who have already played them, the scuffs and bites and dents that are the mysterious scars of sound. In their midst the house hangs, tenuous and enveloping, a sounding board waiting to be struck."

Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears

"The age of recording is necessarily an age of nostalgia--when was the past so hauntingly accessible?--but its bitterest insight is the incapacity of even the most perfectly captured sound to restore the moment of its first inscribing. That world is no longer there."

Geoffrey O'Brien, Sonata for Jukebox: An Autobiography of My Ears