Robert Hilburn Quotes

I grew up listening to the Beatles and being an ardent Beatles fan when I was in third grade all the way to adulthood, and listening to all kinds of music that came to us either at the flea market or in our living rooms or on the 'Ed Sullivan' show - all these places we were influenced by.

Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.

I think I skipped a lot of music, like when I was 17 or 18. I didn't know about a lot of new bands because I was so immersed in older music.

The first record I bought myself could have been 'Oh Lonesome Me' by Don Gibson or 'Wake Up Little Susie' by the Everly Brothers.

I still play my old vinyl LPs - I like the scratches - and I miss browsing in record shops, because they held great nostalgia for me.

They say the music you listen to in your formative years stays with you and leaves an impression for the rest of your life. For me, the things that I fell in love with happened in the '70s, when artists were nurtured by record companies and it wasn't about singles.

My dad has a really great record collection that basically went up to the year I was born: 1984.

I love the history of popular music. I love to know what people are listening to, even if I don't like it.

Both of my parents were super music lovers when I was growing up - they had a massive record and tape collection. I think my dad even had a couple of laser discs, but that was a short-lived thing.

But I knew - in the old days, if a song was a good song, I don't care if it was 'Yellow Submarine' or, you know, or 'The Times They Are a-Changin' or 'Don't Be Cruel', you knew it, you know? You heard that song, and you were talking about it, and you knew it.

You know you're a hopeless record nerd when your time travel fantasies always come around to how cool it would be to go back to 1973 and buy all the great funk and jazz and salsa records that came out that year on tiny obscure labels and are now really rare and expensive.

There are the people who overthink making mix CDs and playlists, and how that works generationally is all really interesting to me.

I don't know who's 18 years old today that, 20 years hence, is going to be a jazz fan.

My mom was real into like a lot of different musical artists, real artists, even back when Jay-Z and Beyonce was together.

I still love it. I love lots of other music, too, and always have, but punk's the soundtrack of my youth. I think you never escape the music you're listening to and seeing when you're seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old.

When I was growing up in the early '70s and really getting into music, waiting outside the record store for that 45, waiting for a single from The Dead, The Clash, David Bowie, or T-Rex or something to be there. There was something about that that was so special.

What people don't understand is that my dad isn't up on the contemporary music scene. He's been a legend for decades and he doesn't know what's going on right now, and he doesn't need to.

Back in the day you wanted your albums to have a theme, and 'Sports' theme was really a collection of singles. It was really a record for its time.

I was born in '71, so I remember bits of glam rock on 'Top of the Pops' toward the late '70s, but I had no idea what kind of world it was. I didn't like the music, either.

I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first of all, has got to be put into the context of being an American cultural showcase. It's there to be a museum showcase of all that's great about American music.

I just change with the times. I really don't have a say in what's going on. Music was here before me.

My parents were music lovers and collectors. It was around.

There's something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There's something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

There are so many bands that I'm kind of aware of through media about them, and it ends up filtering my experience of the actual music.

I keep on calling them records because they will always be records to me.