Rob Sheffield

Rob Sheffield writes about music as part of everyday emotional history, combining criticism with memoir and cultural commentary. Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time is organized around fifteen cassette track lists that map his years with his first wife, Renée, and the bereavement that followed her sudden death. The memoir appeared from Crown in 2007. Sheffield's account keeps songs and private memory in close conversation, showing how a familiar recording can preserve a friendship, a room, or a stage of life. He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and has carried that personal approach into books including Talking to Girls About Duran Duran and Dreaming the Beatles. The result is less a conventional history of popular music than an examination of what listeners ask music to remember for them.