Music

A voice and an electric guitar make sound the same way, which is why the same words describe both. The difference is that a voice moves its resonances and a guitar's are fixed in its hardware.

The record stores that survived streaming no longer exist to get music to people. They are the rooms where a release becomes an occasion, and the biggest occasion runs on a shortage made on purpose.

An album's length, the break between its sides and the number of songs on it have always looked suspiciously like the format it was sold on.

A compact disc player in 1986 had a button marked with two triangles and a bar. Press it and the next track started, cleanly, at the beginning. No lifting a needle, no guessing at the fast-forward.

In July 1982 the Fujigen factory in Matsumoto, Japan, changed one thing on a guitar it had been building for a few months. The early export models carried a big Fender logo and a small "Squier Series."

Put two sealed copies of the same CD on a desk. Same cover, same barcode, same music, maybe the same factory. One sat in a shop the week the album came out. The other was made and stocked years later, after the album had become something people already knew.

Katy Perry has three firsts. Her debut album, Katy Hudson, came out in March 2001 on a small Christian label and sold between 100 and 200 copies before the label went bankrupt.

You can sing a song you know from the first line without trying. Ask yourself to start at the second verse and something odd happens: you go back and run up to it. That small detour is the best clue to what knowing a song is.

Many of the mistakes may start in the record, before any model reads it. A guitar's serial number can belong to several manufacturing histories at once, and the detail that says which one is usually not written next to it.