[A] Thanks. I assembled the 1,000 Albums for a Long and Happy Life file in 2008, partly in response to Tom Moon's book (the actual list appears to be here; I was unaware of Dave Whitaker's websites until now, and need to do some research). As I recall, my source file includes several thousand more albums, commented out. While I've added a few albums since 2008 (current count is 1060; at this level it's hard to drop anything), I've never updated this shadow list, which would probably have been twice as long had I scraped it together now. What I can refer you to is the index of A-List files, which add up to 9009 albums (19.7% of my rated total) and are updated as I add items to the database — as is the All A/A+ List (currently 1431 albums, 3.1% of total rated). I have thousands of albums that give me pleasure any time I play them. I should probably weed out the ones that don't, but for now most are tied up in memories, hence my sentimental attachments.

My bad mood is a coping mechanism, part of how I deal with stress. I saw a doctor last week, where they routinely screen patients of my age for depression. I answered their questions with numerous complaints, and all they did was jot down "not at all." I don't expect my mood to change until I find something I really want to do, but I'm going through the usual motions: reading relevant nonfiction, writing my usual notes, listening to lots of music (some new), thinking about serious subjects, doing odd jobs around the house. None of this is very satisfying, and I fear that my productivity has not only diminished but will only decline further. But I am engaged. And I don't feel any obligation to act happy about it.

[A] Yes, we're friends, and have been since 1975, which is when he asked me to write a Bachman-Turner Overdrive review for the Village Voice. We talked on the phone, but I didn't actually meet him until January 1977, when I picked the coldest winter ever to visit New York City. He graciously spent a week showing me around, and helped me settle in when I moved there a few months later. I gave up on writing for the Voice in 1979, but after I moved to New Jersey (and later Massachusetts, then NJ again) he always made time for me when made it back to the city, and sometimes he drove out. It probably helped that he was the one who introduced me to Laura Tillem, my second wife. While we haven't seen each other much since I moved to Kansas, I did spend a couple weeks in New York with him in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, building his website. Despite all this, I can't tell you if he drinks coffee (I don't), but we have shared many meals over the years, including some I've cooked, as well as many by Carola.

While we have many different takes on albums, I'm not sure how much of that can be ascribed to taste. We do have many similarities in terms of background, starting with a working class identity we quickly transcended without ever disavowing. Also, neither of us ever developed a serious interest in playing music, or understanding it on a technical level, so we've always been more concerned with the social nature of listening. But we also have some significant differences: he started eight years earlier (b. 1942, vs. 1950 for me), grew up in hoity toity New York (whereas my parents were just off the farm in Kansas), sailed through an Ivy League college (I dropped out of high school) and into a career as a professional writer and editor (I worked in typesetting, then software). Such differences show up in many ways — for one thing, he's much more attuned to lyrics than I am — but they have more to do with what we're exposed to and how we work. He's heard a lot of live music, whereas I've heard fairly little (probably half of all the concerts I've heard has been with him). He's heard much more music in social contexts, and he is exceptionally good at gleaning insights from other people's reactions. And his "job" has led him to focus more narrowly on certain kinds of music — especially on "alt/indie rock" groups (which I'm easily bored with), and various artists deemed pressworthy (Adele, Sam Smith, and Harry Styles come to mind as ones I checked out and quickly dismissed). Taste may have something to do with these disagreements, but other factors strike me as more likely.

As some kind of scientist, the way I would test taste is to do matched single-play blindfold tests with a wide range of records. That would control for different processing methods and most selection bias (some musicians would inevitably be recognized, and reacted to accordingly — Charlie Parker has been a rare bone of contention since Christgau tried to turn me onto him in the 1970s). Aside from some arbitrary tics that hit us differently, I doubt you will find much divergence. We disdain classical and metal, most likely for the same reasons, and go for world music when the rhythm moves us. We listen to rap and country in similar measures — I tend toward more obscure artists, while he pays more attention to semi-stars, but they balance out (on both fronts, he's more into words, whereas I depend more on sounds). I'm more into disco/electropop, except when Nina sells him on some teen throb I have no interest in. He's kept engaged with indie rock and mainstream soul, which I follow less and rarely take much interest in (there are exceptions, of course). And he's been able to handle what sounds to me like glitchy crap (100 Gecs, Skrillex, Tune-Yards), making me wonder if I'm not settling into old fogeydom, or at least pop music obsolence. I buy the theory that there are always interesting things happening, but I can struggle to keep up, and sometimes find my interest waning.

Then there is jazz, where we do have some fairly obvious taste differences: I like trad-jazz and swing, he prefers classic be-bop, I enjoy soul jazz, he's focused on fusion (although not so much recently), I've gone much deeper into avant-garde. Still, it's hard to separate these taste differences from career choices and processes. Back in the 1980s, he took the view that jazz was something he could fall back on when the pop choices got lean. He reviewed many cutting edge records then, including Air, Arthur Blythe, David Murray, and Don Pullen. Sometime in the 1990s he gave up. I recognized this one time he visited us in Boston. When he came in, I was playing a jazz album he instantly liked. But as soon as I told him who it was by — Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, featuring Belgian guitarist Philip Catherine — his face deflated, acknowledging that he would never write about such a thing. Clearly, his taste was ready, but he doubted his expertise, and didn't feel he could budget the time.

By the way, he made a different decision on African music: sampling it widely and reviewing it extensively, despite impossible language barriers and a general lack of reference information on a vast subject. But no one else was doing it, and he single-handedly made it part of his domain. What little I know comes from following him, and still feels superficial to me. Our tastes may have diverged recently as I've been slow to embrace the latest South African amapiano (or gqom or whatever), but that's probably also true for the latest trends in Lagos or Kinshasa or Nairobi or Dakar — that we're more aware of a backwater like Kampala seems like dumb luck, or like globalization has jumped ahead of us.