Stephen Mejias

Click the external link to hear (and see) JA's current fave demo track.

It kind of happens intuitively, like breathing or crying or finding your way back home. Every year around this time, I scan my compact disc racks and watch as my hand reaches for The Flaming Lips' 1995 album, Clouds Taste Metallic. I put the disc in the player. I sit back. And I listen, and I remember.

The January 2009 issue of Stereophile is now on newsstands. Volume 32 Number 1 is pretty much bursting at the seams with radicalness. I received a voicemail from a long-time subscriber telling me so. It went:

We walked and walked and walked&#151stopping in pubs along the way&#151and gradually became more and more lost.

I often wanted to turn back, in fact, but Pete was so damn far ahead of me that I couldn't even get his attention. I kept following.

At the top of what I'd later learn to call "Arthur's Peak," I looked out onto the jagged, gray city and felt immortal.

Pete gave me the two fingers.