“But then a teenage boy might well find that nothing can be more intimate than rummaging through a girl’s record collection. In these grooved surfaces are embedded the emotions they elicit from her, in her imagined privacy. By playing her records, absorbing the same sounds that she has absorbed, he becomes her, keeps her inside himself. Sound is the conduit between worlds, or at least between nervous systems. To these same trills her bones have thrilled. In the same half-swallowed sob both of them, separately, have nearly wept. Alone together! In different places, the same sounds find the same pressure points. They become one by inhabiting the same virtual listening booth. Music is a body.”
– Geoffrey O’Brien, “Top Forty” chapter in Sonata for Jukebox: An Authobiography of My Ears