Turn Around Bright Eyes Quotes

“If all music did was bring the past alive, that would be fine. You can hide away in music and let it recapture memories of things that used to be. But music is greedy and it wants more of your heart than that. It demands the future, your future. Music wants the rest of your life. So you can't rest easy. At any moment, a song can come out of nowhere to shake you up, jump-start your emotions, ruin your life.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“You have blundered into an adult existence you don't understand, and you can't tell whether you planned it this way or whether you screwed up big-time, though it's too late either way.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“The things that bring couples together will always terrify me more than the things that tear us apart. They will always be harder to explain. They will always keep me up later. Love gone wrong has inspired so many great songs, but somehow, love going right is what's bizarre. It exposes deep freakcraft in the universe. As far as I'm concerned, 'some people are very kind' is the scariest line Bob Dylan ever wrote. Compared to that, his breakup songs are kid stuff. Some people are very kind and there's nothing in the universe to explain why.
It's a mystery how people lose each other--but to me, it's an even stranger mystery we manage to stay together, or to collide together at all.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“Trying to live in the past didn't work for me, and it's only now that I fully realize I'm incredibly lucky it didn't. Because it would have been all too sad to miss out on right now. That would have turned the past into a fraud. It would have meant all my happy memories were a lie. It would have meant all that time and all that love was a waste, leading up to a wasted future. It would have been the ultimate betrayal of everything I thought my whole life was about and everyone I cared about. All the people who loved me, in all the times and places of my life—all the people who made a lover out of me—they would have all been wrong about me. And it could have happened easily, just like that. It's scary to think of how I could have gotten stuck pining for the past. I was lucky to get a second chance. I thought I was too late, but it turns out I was just in time.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“Singing what's in your heart? Naming the things you love and loathe? You can get hurt that way. Hell, you will get hurt that way. But you'll get hurt trying to hide away in all that silence and leave your life unsung. There's no future without tears. Are you really setting your hopes on not getting hurt at all? You think that's an option? You clearly aren't listening to enough Morrissey songs.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“What I get out of karaoke is a little weirder than mere musical competence. It's a love ritual that keeps me coming back, craving more, because this is where the songs are. And the songs are full of stories. Every one we sing is charged up with memories of the past or dreams of the future. Every song reminds me of good times or bad times. Yet they all hold surprises.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“To enter into that karaoke mindset, you have to leave behind all your notions of good or bad, right or wrong, in tune or out of tune. The kara in the word karaoke is the same as the one in karate, which means 'empty hand.' They're both 'empty' arts because you have no weapons and no musical instruments to hide behind--only courage, your heart, and your will to inflict pain.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“Girls are the White Album and they all have Revolution 9's. They have all that stuff you wish you could edit out.
When you fall in love with a girl, she's the bloody White Album. That is what you whisper to yourself, when you don't understand her at all. You just keep telling yourself, she's the bloody Beatles White Album and there's only one of her.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“...We recognize that smile when we see it in the mirror, or on the faces of our friends, at weddings, anniversaries, christenings, or ordinary afternoons. It's the smile of a man realizing he is no longer a kid, and although he has no idea how it happened, he's pretty sure it would make a cool story if he ever gets a spare minute to piece it all together.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“The important thing isn't that we're freakazoidal about the same things--it's that she's as freakazoidal about her stuff as I am about mine, and that enthusiasm can't help but unite us, even if the object thereof doesn't. If two people are twisted enough to connect on a deep level, it's only natural there will be lots of angles where they don't connect at all.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“Something I really enjoy about older couples is that they really have given up on getting everything right. They don't sweat the imperfections.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“...you may not be the target audience for new music anymore. But that just means you have to scrounge a little harder to find it. You don't necessarily want to make a religion out of it; you just want to keep participating. Music isn't an accessory to a lifestyle--it's part of a life. It's not a youthful phase you go through.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“I suck at fighting. I have never really learned how to talk and be mad at the same time. If I have angry words to say, I need time to rehearse. I can't improvise when my head's dizzy with adrenaline; I have to cool down and then write out a script. I found this trait very difficult when I was trying to be a boyfriend, because in my experience, boyfriends and girlfriends often spend a lot of time fighting. Husbands and wives seem to spend a lot of time avoiding fights. This might be a bad thing, for all I know, but it seems to be part of why I like being a husband better.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“So you get less shy about how hard you have to try. And you don't bother hiding your Kotter tapes. Sure, they expose some of my appalling deficiencies. But my appalling deficiencies are all I have to offer. Is there such a thing as romantic love that does not depend on someone embracing my deficiencies? I hope I will never find out.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“Tacos will grow on Christmas trees before I learn to carry a tune. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter. In karaoke, talent means nada; enthusiasm is everything. What I lack in talent, I make up for in passion. Hence my karaoke problem.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“This is what they call "hitting rock bottom," and they call it that because it rocks.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“There’s only the one, see. When you fall in love with a girl, she’s the bloody White Album. That is what you whisper to yourself, when you don’t understand her at all. You just keep telling yourself, she’s the bloody Beatles White Album and there’s only one of her.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“Anything can be a love song as long as two people care about it.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“For all karaoke freaks around the nation, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is one of those sacred anthems. It’s the kind of song that announces, “Dearly beloved, we have so totally gathered here today.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“Being a husband is scary....We have everything to lose. We have made promises. We have given hostages to fortune and challenged fate to a dance-off. We have chosen a future full of loss....when you marry somebody, you are guaranteeing that you will have real problems, a future full of them, the kind that involve death and disease and grief. As husbands, we have *planned* on major anguish. We can't afford to use up all our patience at once, or over things that aren't all that important.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“IF ALL MUSIC DID WAS bring the past alive, that would be fine. You can hide away in music and let it recapture memories of things that used to be. But music is greedy and it wants more of your heart than that. It demands the future, your future. Music wants the rest of your life. So you can’t rest easy. At any moment, a song can come out of nowhere to shake you up, jump-start your emotions, ruin your life.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“As the old saw goes, the Irish songs are full of happy wars and unhappy lovers.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“sometimes you can feel like you’re experiencing some of the most honest, most intimate moments of your life, while butchering a Hall & Oates song at 2 a.m. in a room full of strangers.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“Problems that don't get fixed, situations that neither get resolved nor go away, and annoyances you live with year by year--that's the engine knock of a long-running relationship.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“Rod exemplifies the attitude that Losing It is no big deal. He saw that fate coming, and he was already planning to get over it.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“That same power translates everywhere, all around the world, because nothing expresses joy like singing together.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“We have individual geekdoms that we've turned the other one on to and individual geekdoms we prefer to enjoy alone. There are also the geekdoms that inspire us to try to convert each other.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“But right now, karaoke is one of the places where we go to form our own culture club, which is one of the millions of things a relationship is—building a shared language out of the things that fire up your blood. Couples need as many of those languages as they can get.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“If you freak out over trivial everyday grievances, how are you going to handle *real* problems?”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke

“She also told me about the night one of her astrophysics friends went to a bar trivia contest where the final question was "What does Kelvin measure?" The winning answer was "heat," but her friend explained that Kelvin measures temperature, not heat, since heat is energy and is measured in energy units like joules or ergs. The astronomer refused to back down, until the battle had to be settled with a chug-off. These astro people are hard-core.”
― Rob Sheffield, Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke