“Hot Cha” never will come back. The prodigal son will remain uneaten.

“Women and Men” was an Escher drawing in my head. The lyrics unpacked to contain the lyrics, the people will cross the ocean into the jungle forever. “Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love” is a perfect phrase, almost as beautiful as “cellar door,” and it is up on the screen in my mind in a movie of black and white and sapphire blue.

They Might Be Giants wrote a song for themselves, and it explains the band’s name and everything else about them. Hold on to the merry-go-round.

We are all in a “Road Movie to Berlin.” Or at least, we are all in a road movie, and some of us will wind up in Berlin in 1989, if we just keep going.

And now it’s the future, and Flood came out a long, long time ago. The floodwaters are still rising, along with the ocean levels. Some things never go out of style.

Liner notes for the twenty-fifth-anniversary release of They Might Be Giants’ Flood LP.

Lou Reed, in Memoriam: “The Soundtrack to My Life”

“There are certain kinds of songs you write that are just fun songs—the lyric really can’t survive without the music. But for most of what I do, the idea behind it was to try and bring a novelist’s eye to it, and, within the framework of rock and roll, to try to have that lyric there so somebody who enjoys being engaged on that level could have that and have the rock and roll too.” That was what Lou Reed told me in 1991.

I’m a writer. I write fiction, mostly. People ask me about my influences, and they expect me to talk about other writers of fiction, so I do. And sometimes, when I can, I put Lou Reed on the list too, and nobody ever asks what he’s doing there, which is good because I don’t know how to explain why a songwriter is responsible for so much of the way I view the world.

His songs were the soundtrack to my life: a quavering New York voice with little range singing songs of alienation and despair, with flashes of impossible hope, those tiny perfect days and nights we want to last forever, important because they are so finite and so few; songs filled with people, some named, some anonymous, who strut and stagger and flit and shimmy and hitchhike into the limelight and out again.

It was all about stories. The songs implied more than they told: they made me want to know more, to imagine, to tell those stories myself. Some of the stories were impossible to unpack, others, like “The Gift,” were classically constructed short stories. Each of the albums had a personality. Each of the stories had a narrative voice: often detached, numb, without judgment.

Trying to reconstruct it in my head: it wasn’t even the music that sucked me in, initially, as much as it was a 1974 NME interview I read when I was thirteen that hooked me. The opinions, the character, the street-smarts, his loathing of the interviewer. He was in the Sally Can’t Dance phase, drugged out, the most commercially successful and most mocked album of his career. I wanted to know who Lou Reed was, so I bought and borrowed everything I could, because the interview was about stories, and stories that would become songs.