Aside from their requisite forward-blown Bieber hair, everything about One Direction has existed since boy band time immemorial. The inoffensively pleasant sound. The carefree beach-themed videos. The roster of four or five just-distinctive-enough guys to assure vehement lunchroom battles over who qualifies as the cute one. None of that’s an accident. The boy band generally does not form organically in somebody’s garage, born of the fire inside a handful of comrades to rock the hell out.

Sure, sometimes, the group may consist of classmates, like Philly’s Boyz II Men, or siblings, like Hanson, the Jonas Brothers, the Osmonds, or the Jackson 5. But more often, the boy band is a calculated venture, designed expressly to capitalize on the nascent hormonal drives of young females. It originates when someone answers a casting call or forms a business plan. The Monkees began with an idea for a TV show about a Beatles-like quartet. Menudo managed to keep rolling for two decades thanks to an ever-changing roster of fresh boy meat brought in when the veterans aged out. The Backstreet Boys came together via a newspaper ad in Orlando, America’s cradle of theme parks and make-believe. And One Direction formed when a bunch of U.K. “X Factor” competitors pooled their resources.

To be in a boy band is to enjoy a precarious kind of fame. The adulation and the sales success are usually as fleeting as the cusp of adolescence itself. Boys become men. Even Boyz II Men become men. Sometimes, those boys go on to become a Ricky Martin or Justin Timberlake, with a thriving, mature career. Sometimes, they coast for years on their youthful moment of fame, like Bobby Brown or Nick Lachey. And sometimes, they just wind up being that guy from Color Me Badd. Yet when you’re armed with good looks, good hair and a few remedial moves, it must be a sweet ride for however long it lasts. Just this Thursday, Big Time Rush boastfully declared themselves the “Best Boy Band of All Time,” a claim that the now-lurching-toward-middle-age 98 Degrees will have to challenge when they reunite for a tour this summer.

Someday, those sweet kids from One Direction, the ones whose “What Makes You Beautiful” homage to hair-flipping is currently pushing you to climb the walls faster than the song can climb the charts, will have thinning hair and beer guts. They’ll do an oldies tour for their die-hard devotees. And by then, their older and settled former fans will understand why their moms still shout “That’s my jam!” when New Edition comes on the radio, or their grandmothers cried the day Davy Jones died. It’s because you never forget your first love. And for a lot of girls, it’s clear who that person was. It was the cute one.

What’s wrong with me?

Like many music connoisseurs whose tastes were forged in the ‘90s, I’ve long admired Built to Spill, the rare rock band that’s spent its entire career basking in the adulation of critics and fans. The New York Times once compared singer/guitarist/founder Doug Martsch to Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. The band’s devotion is deserved. Even as its members settle comfortably into middle age, Built to Spill remains emblematic of a certain post-adolescent longing. Their sound is catchy, twisty and inventive, and their lyrics burst with wit and humanity. There’s every reason to like them if you like complex arrangements and blistering solos. (And if you don’t, who needs you?)

What I wonder, though, is why my devotion evolved into full-bore obsession. I mean: 406 times. Am I suffering from some psychological malady? Some neurological tic? Perhaps that sounds hysterical, but my family tree has borne a veritable bushel of obsessive, compulsive, biologically quirky fruit. And my need to listen to this band upward of three times a day approaches a kind of addictive behavior: I’ve blown off deadlines to listen to them, I’ve violated FAA takeoff regulations to listen to them, I’ve irritated my spouse and become physically uncomfortable when I can’t listen to them. It worries me. One night on my evening commute back to the Bronx, I tried to go cold turkey without the song. I lasted six subway stops before I fell off the wagon. (I imagine people at my funeral: “How’d she die?” “Built to Spill overdose,” they’ll say.) So, will I really be listening only to “Perfect From Now On” … from now on? And if so, why?

I pick up Dr. Daniel J. Levitin’s fascinating book, “This Is Your Brain on Music,” in which he describes the phenomenon of “earworms,” or songs that stick in your head. Built to Spill is stuck in my head, for sure; the difference between me and the case studies Levitin describes is that I’m OK with it – as opposed to the helpless frustration others feel when they can’t stop singing, say, the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started.” Still, the earworm theory seems applicable. “Our best explanation,” Levitin writes, “is that the neural circuits representing a song get stuck in ‘playback mode’ … it is rarely an entire song that gets stuck, but rather a piece.”

It’s true that I often turn to this album because some brief moment of it is drilling through my mind. In “Randy Described Eternity,” I can hear the opening with its clean, quiet guitar, which peals out two alternating notes in a cadence reminiscent of a car alarm. I can hear another guitar entering, descending mournfully and then repeating, like the melody is crumbling and rebuilding itself. Most of Built to Spill’s albums are composed of disparate chunks like these, expertly stitched together.

Levitin also confirms a relationship between earworms and obsessive-compulsive disorder: “In some cases medications for OCD can minimize the effects,” he writes. To shed some light on the OCD question, I make my way to that most trusted of diagnostic tools: the Internet quiz. Am I plagued with the fear that I might accidentally harm my family members? No. Do I have excessive religious thoughts? No. Do I worry that I might be infected with a disease? Well, just OCD. After six questionnaires — including the industry standard Yale-Brown (Y-BOCS) Obsessive Compulsive Scale — give me a relatively clean bill of health, I finally relax.

If my fixation isn’t neurological, maybe it’s psychological. This record makes me feel so much — joy, pain, amusement, nostalgia for a bygone time. Perhaps this last one is key. Built to Spill’s recent albums are fantastic, but I’ve chosen to fixate on one that sounds distinctly like the ‘90s, a time before the specter of terrorism, when TV’s only reality show aimed to teach people tolerance (I refer, of course, to “The Real World”). Maybe this is happening because I’m about to turn 30; there’s nothing like a milestone birthday to send one into a thumb-sucking state of regression. Maybe it’s significant that May 2011, the month this insanity began, was the same month I published my first novel, an anxiety-provoking time. Maybe it’s as simple as this: Adulthood is often terrifying, and “Perfect From Now On” is a cozy escape to my teenage years, when I would lie in bed with a Discman and listen to this band through foam headphones, Doug Martsch’s voice in my ear like he was speaking solely to me.

Trying to identify the root of my behavior, there is one more source I have in mind. So one night, while wandering Built to Spill’s rather unkempt website, I dash off an interview request. I didn’t really think it would work. When a nice woman from Warner Bros. emails to arrange the call, I’m beset with cold sweats. I have no idea what to ask. Or what I hope to accomplish. But then I finally hear his voice on the call, actually talking to me alone: Doug Martsch.

“I am fucking loving this,” he says, once I’ve explained my situation. “What is it you’re listening to?”

When I tell him, his voice deflates. Wrong answer, I guess. I ask which record is his favorite.

“The last two are listenable,” he says. “The earlier stuff I can’t deal with.”

“Wow.”

“It’s just not my cup of tea. I listened to ‘Perfect From Now On’ a few years ago and couldn’t get through it. The singing is too precious.”

“So when I said I love that record, did you judge me?”

“Of course,” he jokes. “I thought you had really bad taste.” He’s so nice and down-to-earth, I forget to be nervous. “You know, I have no idea what you hear when you put on a Built to Spill record. I have no idea how you relate to it, what it means to you, what it sounds like at all.”

“When you like something,” I ask, “do you like it obsessively?”

“Not really,” he says. “My method is to savor things. If I’m obsessed with a song, I’ll put it away. And then I’ll be like, Oh, that’ll be nice when my iPod chooses that song.”

“Do you think it’s a good idea to meet your idols?” I ask.

“If you like normal people,” he says.

“Have you ever had a memorable experience meeting a fan?”

“Not really,” he says. “Most Built to Spill fans aren’t all that rabid. Except you. If I ever get that question again, you’ll be the answer.”

After we hang up, I email him my address, since he’s offered to send recordings of his old punk outfit, the Treepeople, and the covers record he and some friends made under the name Boise Cover Band, “so you never have to listen to anything else again,” he says. I take the subway home, and as usual, pull out my iPod and press play in the same spot. Not even Martsch’s own distaste for his album is enough to sour my devotion to it.

A week later, a package arrives. Along with the two CDs, there’s a note that begins, “Hope I didn’t tease you too much,” and ends, “♥ Doug.” (Reader, I framed it.) My husband and I play Treepeople and experience an echo of the not unpleasant psychic agita that punk rock inspired in us in high school, when we came by our angst more honestly. The album is fresh and immediate. Then we try Boise Cover Band’s “Unoriginal Artists,” a collection of obscure R&B, spacey ballads, and such classics as the Pretenders’ “Back on the Chain Gang” and Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes,” all rendered with care and consistency in tender Martsch-ese. But there’s a moment during the song “I Love You More” when Martsch goes into panty-dropping doo-wop mode — “My pretty baby,” he wails, “my little darlin’…” — that makes me audibly gasp. This is swoon music. I feel the same vertiginous sensation I experienced the first time I ate a soft shell crab, or saw a Coen brothers film, or met my husband — an “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” feeling.

Weeks pass. I don’t touch “Perfect From Now On.” The play count for “Unoriginal Artists” is 76 (though ask me again in an hour), but it seems something has shaken me from my mania. A friend recommends St. Vincent, and I give her a listen; a bookstore where I’m shopping plays Hall and Oates, and I get deep into it; one morning I revisit Animal Collective’s “Strawberry Jam” and feel like I’ve been asleep for a hundred years.

Then again, “Unoriginal Artists” is playing as I type, as it has been for most of the day. I listened to Treepeople in the car last Saturday and bought their other albums. I also bought (and adore) Martsch’s solo album, “Now You Know.” When I learned recently that Built to Spill would be touring again after a hiatus, I scrambled to buy tickets; when I read that they’d likely release an album this year or next, I leapt for joy.

I’ve abandoned the worry that there’s something wrong with my brain or my psyche. As best as I can figure, the absurd adage that we each have a soul mate is actually true — except not about people, just music. Maybe I’m just lucky enough to have found the songs that are the most in tune with who I am and what I want to feel and they happen to come from the same artist. However monogamous my musical taste has become, maybe the lesson here is simply that — to invoke the title of another of Doug Martsch’s fine records — there’s nothing wrong with love.

The collision of Lethem and Talking Heads makes perfect sense. Both can’t escape being identified with New York – or, in Lethem’s case, Brooklyn – and despite working in disparate modes, each brings the formalism and precision of the high arts to popular forms. Lethem fans already know of his love of the band – composed of David Byrne (vocals and guitar), Tina Weymouth (bass), Chris Frantz (drums) and Jerry Harrison (keyboards, guitar) –  from his essay “The Beards.” There, he connected his love of  “Fear of Music” to the aftermath of his mother’s death from a brain tumor. “I have an obvious predisposition to handling the material of 1978 and ’79 with an exaggerated, personal intensity,” he told me. We spoke via Skype, Lethem from his office at Pomona College where he is the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing.

What drew you to Talking Heads’ music as a youth?

In 1978 I launched myself out of a very difficult Brooklyn public school and got into the High School of Music and Art, in Manhattan. It was like crossing the threshold. Suddenly I was hanging out in Harlem, trying to figure out who the cool kids were and how I could become one of them, or whether I somehow already qualified. Everyone had their band; it was pretty much like a menu: You could be into the Ramones or Cheap Trick or the Dictators. U.K. punk was this attractive signal coming in, but we had a special affinity for the New York bands. I had a friend that semester who was into Television — he was a little hipper than I was.

I was just at the right conjugation of nerdy, alienated and hyper-alert that I identified instantly with Talking Heads. They sang songs about books! I got it immediately.

In the book you call “Fear of Music” a paranoid album, and other works of art you’ve written about – some Stanley Kubrick films, and Philip K. Dick’s novels, for instance – have this bent as well. Are you a paranoid person?

Paranoia is closely related to a subject that’s right at the heart of the album: fear. Paranoia is an intellectual shading on a somatic experience, a physical reality that is fear. I experienced a lot of fear — not only my mother’s death, but I lived through a rather desperate chapter of New York’s urban history  —and it shaped me. Paranoia is a kind of utilization of fear, like “Let’s pick this fear up and shine it around like a flashlight and see what I can see with it.” As it invests itself in certain kinds of artworks, like in Philip K. Dick’s novels, paranoia tends to be a mode of inquiry and exploration — a philosophical mode, really. In that sense, it was attractive to me, because it was a lot less passive than just lying there and trembling.

But I try to disentwine my inclination for conspiracy and paranoia in artwork from its general lack of not only usefulness but interest in everyday life, where it’s actually a way of shutting possibilities down.

Do you have a favorite song on “Fear of Music”? From your description of “Heaven” – “If heaven’s impossible to know, ‘Heaven’s’ hard to recollect” – that seems to be your least favorite.

I received, in a very specific way, skepticism about “Heaven.” I have a friend, John Hilgart, who was a sounding board while I worked on this book. Hilgart said, quite passingly, “I always felt on Side 2, after ‘Air,’ there’s a three-song lull. I like ‘Heaven’ in principle, but to listen to it is kind of boring.” And then he felt, and I think this would be a much more common remark, that “Animals” and “Electric Guitar” are buried on Side 2 because they’re less inspired melodically or fully realized, and bear less relistening.

I had always held the whole album on this pedestal, where, in a way, it was all exactly as good as itself. I saw it as fractal, “This album is perfect, therefore everything on it is perfect.” Besides, I had always taken “Heaven” as a sacred object — everyone knows this is one of the masterpiece songs. But when Hilgart said that it was like – click! – “Heaven” is one of those things that I listen to and tell myself I’m loving it, but it’s actually boring. I started focusing on the idea of tedium, because the song’s self-referential; it wants to be boring.

In fact, I like “Heaven” a lot. The only song I’m uncomfortable with is “Electric Guitar.” The song is crippled by its disorganized quality, and it doesn’t seem as pure conceptually, because how do you put an electric guitar up there with air, heaven, animals, mind? It doesn’t belong on that stage. Also, it’s been played live barely ever. It’s a sitting duck if you need there to be a worst song on the album, though, really, I don’t know if “Fear of Music” needs to have one.

I do know that my favorites are the two side closers. I wouldn’t want to have to choose between “Drugs” and “Memories Can’t Wait.” Those became the most rewarding songs to write about; they just got richer and richer for me. I actually made myself like them even more, which I didn’t think was possible. Of course, “Life During Wartime”  is pretty good too. [laughs]

Did you find yourself liking the album more in general as a result of writing about it?

It was like having any subject before you when you’re writing a book — your own characters, your childhood, some stupid idea you made up about Tourette’s syndrome, whatever it might be that you’ve committed years of your life to — you love it and hate it a lot along the way. There were days when I felt utterly under its hobnailed boot, and there were days when I did not want to listen to “Fear of Music” again. I wrote through those feelings, of course, as you do with your contempt for all the different assignments life has given you, and I was enraptured by the end.

What’s weird is that I put it on for pleasure now. Your iTunes counts listenings, and my entire top 25 most-listened-to tracks on iTunes is all “Fear of Music” and different live versions of the songs. It was ceaseless, to the point where my wife would force me to switch to the headphones.

How did you start?

I rarely delay — and certainly proportionate to how many pages the piece was, I don’t think I’ve ever delayed starting a project as long. There are novels that I had in mind for three or four years, or even more than that before I began writing them, but those were very long novels. I took three years circling around this.

I kick-started myself in a really specific way. I accepted an invitation to the Experience Music Project Conference to be on a panel about urbanism. I said I would talk about Talking Heads’ relationship to urbanism and the evolution of their vanity as urban dwellers, starting with the “More Songs About Buildings and Food” song “Big Country,” which goes “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me,” to “Fear of Music’s” “Cities,” “I’m finding a city I’m going to check out,” and ending with “True Stories’” “People Like Us,” where they’re pretending to be hicks from Texas. I saw this as a topic I could make an interesting presentation on, but of course I was thinking, I’ll start writing about “Cities” and then I’ll have myself on the page about “Fear of Music.”

There are small traces of that presentation in the chapter on “Cities” in the book. A lot of it had to get thrown out, but at least it got me thinking about how to make something actually occur. I knew that I would write about each song directly and that I wanted to intersperse those chapters with provocative side questions about the album as a whole — I had that structure sitting there. I wrote about the commercial, the radio spot advertising “Fear of Music,” and then I wrote about the album jacket, and then I started writing about “I Zimbra.” Except that I had this weird chunk of thinking about “Cities,” which I incorporated, I wrote the book straight through as it reads.

Were there critical works or other texts that influenced your approach?

I was very conscious of the 33 1/3 books. I’ve been an eager customer, so I was thinking of some of the ones I loved best, like Franklin Bruno’s “Armed Forces,” Douglas Wolk’s James Brown book, “Live at the Apollo,” and Carl Wilson’s book on Celine Dion, “Let’s Talk About Love.” Not that I was going to ape their approaches, which are quite divergent anyway, but I write to enter into a conversation that books on shelves are having. I wanted to be a really exciting member of the 33 1/3 team, I wanted to come in with something that only I could do, but that also was recognizably a contribution to this recent but very interesting tradition.

In terms of critical writing, I followed less a specific example and more the general idea of close reading. I had written a book on the John Carpenter movie “They Live,” where I had just stared at the movie and free-associated. I wanted to do that but more so. “They Live” had a relatively high number of outside comparative texts brought in — other films, artworks and some theoretical things. With “Fear of Music” I thought, let me bring in fewer, and let me sometimes bring in none at all, let me just be with the sound of the songs and say what I’m hearing.

You write that it’s never unimportant asking what was going on in the artist’s life at the moment of creation. Let me turn that on you. Why write this book now?

How can I reconstruct or account for such a sprawling intention? I began fantasizing that I might do a 33 1/3 book before I had even agreed to do one, and “Fear of Music” was always the record that I knew I would write about. Then three years elapsed between agreeing to do it and actually starting.

I have been amazed to find myself doing so much critical and cultural writing, a lot of it being a weird mix of criticism and memoir, or covert memoir pieces pretending to be critical pieces. There’s a long evolution for me, thinking I would write fiction that was all going to be invented, and that I like to read criticism but I would never want to write it, then having it invest in the fiction itself. “Fortress of Solitude” is where that really starts, but “Chronic City” extends it. I incorporated a lot of critical impulses, cultural commentary — even things like liner notes crept into the voice of the book.

Having come into this hyper-developed critical voice without ever meaning to, I wanted to both do it service and quarantine it by writing this book. Like, you go over here and write a whole book about “Fear of Music,” then shut up. This and the “They Live” book would be both a summit and a farewell, which has to do with an intention for what I want to have happen in my fiction next, which is that I want to stop incorporating the critical voice into it in the same way.

Simultaneously, I think I’m also done with the tokens of my 14- or 15-year-old self. I can’t really imagine anything after this climax of “Fear of Music.” It’s like I finally came out of hiding, like once you show yourself you can slam the door, because the internal paparazzi are satisfied, they got their shot.

In the liner notes of “Sand in the Vaseline,” Jerry Harrison said, “There is a shared sensibility [with Talking Heads fans] that would make friendships immediate.” What’s that sensibility?

They’re pretty bookish. One of the things I thought interesting was how underwritten the songs are. They’re not wordy, really, but the sensibility is so fundamentally literary. Usually people think about Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan or somebody recent like Craig Finn, who have these cascades of descriptions and evocations. Byrne never did that and it doesn’t seem like there was ever a phase in his songwriting career where he was even thinking to do it. But in another way I think Talking Heads are a very literary band in their fundamental stance, their ambivalence and sense of inquiry. I think even when he’s switched to nonsense lyrics there’s a spirit of inquiry that pervades all of Byrne’s best work, and “Fear of Music” is dominated by it.

His friend Andres was also there. Did I mention that? Well, I admit I didn’t want Andres to be there, even though I loved him (but not in that way). Still, Andres did kind of love me in that way, so there we were, a trio of thwarted desire lying in our separate beds, and that’s when Jon introduced me to Tom Waits.

It might be more accurate to say he presented me with Tom Waits. There was enough buildup for British royalty. Shhh. Stop moving. Listen to this part. Did you hear that line? I wish I could remember the song, but I suspect it was early lounge singer Tom Waits. Funny and broken and three sheets to the wind.

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Tom Waits. I was a musical theater fanatic in high school. My friend Catherine and I drove around in her Ford Explorer singing three-part harmonies to En Vogue and the “Grease” soundtrack. But I wanted to know Tom Waits, because I understood that knowing him was a tunnel to Jon, just like Ionesco, and Nietzsche, and Louis Armstrong were also tunnels to Jon. I wanted as many tunnels as I could get. So I listened with reverence, and nodded, and hoped that I could discover some element that would explain Jon to me, or help him find me irresistible. But if I’m totally honest, what I thought the first time I heard Tom Waits was: This is awful.

- – - – - -

A 2002 GQ profile describes Waits’ voice as a clown crossed with a cherry bomb. Waits’ music can be lovely or it can be shot through with carnival menace, but it’s his voice that is his most distinctive quality, a love-it-or-hate-it growl that is sometimes comic in its desperation. It got wilder as he grew older, and his voice serves as a kind of carbon dating system: The early ballads are a boozy baritone; the later stuff is feral. My reaction to his voice at the age of 19 was similar to my first sip of Scotch. My face puckered. I wondered how anyone could drink this stuff. But after years of listening to Tom Waits, I have come to crave that kind of brutality. (After years of listening to Tom Waits, I also came to crave Scotch.)

That GQ story is my favorite profile of Waits. It’s written by Elizabeth Gilbert, who went on to pen a blockbuster memoir about eating and praying and loving. But back then, she was a magazine writer fascinated by masculinity. She wrote a few books on the subject, which I’ve heard are good, and her piece on Waits fits into that puzzle, because he is an off-center, darkly poetic masculine hero. Before I ever loved Tom Waits, I loved guys who loved Tom Waits, and they had certain qualities in common. They all smoked cigarettes (often unfiltered). They loved booze (often whiskey). They drank coffee (black). They had flourishes of eccentricity: A fedora worn to the grocery store, a chain wallet, a deceptively casual method of cupping a flame as they lit a cigarette against the wind. They were reckless and tender and sullen and, good god, they were beautiful. The chips were stacked very high against me back then.

In my sophomore year, I fell in with a guy who practically worshiped at the house of Tom Waits. He and his gang of angry young men (which is what we called them) moped around campus with creative facial hair and a disaffected slouch that marked them as different from other kids who came from the suburbs of Houston and Albuquerque. “I’m interested in the commodification of violence,” one of those guys told me, stabbing the air with his smoking hand, and I went home and wrote it down, because it sounded so cool.

I listened to 10,000 Maniacs — classic, awesome nerd-girl band — and around that time Natalie Merchant recorded a cover of Tom Waits’ “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You,” and the first time I heard it, my breath caught in my throat. It was so fragile, so perfect. “Well, I hope that I don’t fall in love with you / ‘Cause falling in love just makes me blue.” That’s exactly how I felt about the guy, who had sidled up to me at a party, and we had fallen into each other’s bodies in that slumping, slightly meaningful way, and the next day I woke up newly tangled about him, experiencing deep revelations about how gorgeous his eyes were, etc., etc., and all I could think was: No no no, not this again.

That song is one of the greatest ever written about the fleeting romance of last call, the way a dim bar and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s can conspire to make you believe you have lived lifetimes without ever rising from your seat. At the time, I did not quite understand this, but I would spend the next two, 10, 15 years of my life figuring it out.

The guy scoffed at the Natalie Merchant cover. How could a woman like her sing about drinking stout, about “these old tomcat feelings you don’t understand”? I swapped Natalie Merchant’s version in my five-CD changer for the soft grumble of the original, and I never looked back. The guy and I didn’t work out. But I had it bad for Tom Waits.

- – - – - -

I scored points with my next boyfriend for name-checking Tom Waits in an early conversation. The right guy would fall to his knees if you told him your favorite song was “Ol’ 55.” The acquisition of such knowledge was the upside to these botched romances. You would go into a relationship one person — an English major with a kink for Tom Wolfe and ’70s soul — and you would exit with a new list of names piled on your coffee table: Frank Sinatra and Joan Didion and the Violent Femmes. Your heart might be dripping from between your fingers, but hot damn, your CD collection was good.

This boyfriend was the guy who truly made me understand Tom Waits. Not because he explained him to me — the way he explained how to line up a shot in pool, or how to blow a smoke ring — but because I was crazy about him, and he broke up with me a month after we moved in together, and in the six months — OK, a year — after he left, Tom Waits became the soundtrack to my sadness. All those weepers about loving someone who left, leaving someone you still love, all the ragwater and bitters and blue ruin.

I listened to female singers, too. They were a pipeline to rage and melancholy — Tori Amos, Liz Phair, Billie Holliday — but I didn’t seek catharsis so much as I sought to understand, to sift through the wreckage and find some lesson here. Why did he leave me? What had I done wrong? And so on the nights when I felt like running my fingers over those scars I listened to Tom Waits, “The Early Years, Volume One.” I listened to the last track, “Old Shoes and Picture Postcards,” on repeat.

So goodbye, so long, the road calls me, dear, and your tears cannot bind me anymore

And farewell to the girl with the sun in her eyes, and I’ll kiss you and then I’ll be gone

When I listen to that song now, I hear the same desperado cliches I know from a hundred country ballads. But back then, the words were a revelation to me, the final piece of a complex algorithm. You guys, you guys, I got it: He had to leave me, it was destined somehow, locked in our DNA that I would be the one standing on the balcony in my bare feet with tears streaking my face and he would be the one driving off into the sunset in his 1995 Honda Civic, flicking a Camel Light out the window. (This never happened, by the way.) Of course, there were other reasons for our rupture: He had quit drinking, and I had not. He was out of college and finding his way in the world, and I was pouring beer on people’s heads at my birthday party. He needed space, and I longed to be smothered.

But at the time, it was unfathomable: He kissed me, and then he was gone, and I spent the next six months — OK, a year — sleeping with him anyway, trying to get back some of the sunshine and safety I’d felt in his presence and feeling let down all the time. I wrote and produced a play inspired by losing him — it wasn’t about him, but then again, it was entirely about him — and every single night before the curtain rose I would comb the audience from backstage trying to find his face, waiting for the sick electric jolt I would experience when I saw him sitting there. And every single night he would not be there, and I would experience a wave of rejection before the show even began.

After the last performance, I got wasted on a Sunday afternoon. What else could I possibly do? I wanted to know. I fucking wrote a play about him, and he did not come. It seems obvious now: Of course he would not come. Of course he did not want to interrupt his busy life as a newly minted chef to sit in a drafty auditorium and watch some bizarre simulacrum of our time together. But I wrote with the idea that the sheer force of my desire could change his mind. I wrote short stories. I wrote letters I never sent. The thing is when we’re wounded everyone’s a bit insane, Tom Waits sang, and I lived it, man. And what I never stopped to appreciate amid all the soggy tissue and melodrama was that he had given me something far more extraordinary than a college relationship. Fifteen years later, the framed poster for that play still hangs in my hallway, one of the proudest moments of my life. That guy — I think I have his photo in an album, somewhere.

- – - – - -

Waits is such a guy’s guy that it takes a certain kind of woman to love him. I grew up in awe of my older brother — his music was the first guy’s music I ever learned — and part of my story has been an urgent wish to have the same shambling adventures as the men in my life. I wanted to jump off balconies and stagger through the streets of some foreign town, shirt stained with blood. I wanted to pour Bushmill’s down my throat and light myself on fire. I knew every word to the song “Pasties and a G String,” a winking, bawdy ode to the low-rent freedom of live nude girls. In the year after college, I went with a male friend to a strip club — one of those junky roadside joints — and I had this idea that I would run my eyes all over those women, I would devour them, but instead I felt strange and wrong inside, and I made him give all his dollar bills to the heavy women and the older women no one paid attention to, and I went home that night and lay alone in bed feeling so blue. (Because I wasn’t one of those women? Because they were?)

It was hard to find my place in those songs, and in the macho novels I was obsessed with (books about war, books about madcap travels, books about drink and damage). What I never realized — what never occurred to me — was that Tom Waits’ greatest collaborator was his wife, Kathleen Brennan. A former movie executive wary of the spotlight, she has co-written much of his work since “Swordfishtrombones” and in his rare interviews, he speaks of her with genuine warmth. “I’d be working in a steakhouse if it wasn’t for her,” he says in the GQ article. “I wouldn’t even be playing in a steakhouse. I’d be cooking in a steakhouse.”

Maybe that’s what I needed: my own Kathleen Brennan. And where do you find them, anyway? Waits attributes Brennan to cracking open his sound, but it was no doubt her stability that enabled such a grueling, decades-long career in the sideshow. Every sinner needs a saint, or something like that. For a guy who used to fall off piano benches, Tom Waits looks pretty healthy in his old age.

In 1999, I saw him when he played at SXSW in the most-coveted showcase of the year. To say it was a spiritual experience feels too small. It was the best live music show I’ve ever seen, and I can’t imagine I will ever see a better one. I sat in the first balcony with a spectacular three-beer high — not drunk enough to be gone, just drunk enough to be right there — and I remember thinking how booze and music and storytelling were like God. Or maybe I should say: If that’s all God was, it was still a lot.

At 28, I fell in love with a guy who listened to Tom Waits. Of course I did. I assumed that every man I ever loved for the rest of time would be as besotted with Tom Waits as I was, just like he would be as besotted with booze, and cigarettes I could bum from him, and impulsive late-night trips to nowhere in particular, a night and a hangover we could share.

- – - – - -

The next boyfriend was the ultimate Tom Waits boyfriend. He was a homicide detective in New Orleans. He was handsome and solitary. He told me stories about prostitute sweeps in the French Quarter and what it felt like to touch a brain. Decades of kneeling at the altar of such grimness was no doubt part of why I fell for him in the first place. I love gangster movies where everyone dies in a hail of bullets. My favorite show of all time is “The Wire.” It was one of a hundred reasons our romance felt written in the stars to me, but the funny thing about the ultimate Tom Waits boyfriend is that he had never actually heard of Tom Waits.

He liked the Eagles. “I can’t stop listening to this song ‘Hotel California,’” he said to me once. “Have you heard of it?”

“In the seventh grade, baby,” I said, and ran my hand across his cheek, and he gave one those twisty little grins he offered when he felt slightly self-conscious. He didn’t pay much attention to music, or movies; they were necessary distractions from the soul-suck of the murder police. During the holidays, he kept the radio on the Christmas music station all the time (it drove his partner crazy).

But I knew he would love Tom Waits, just like I knew I would move to New Orleans and we would get married and have adorable babies with twisty little grins. I sent him “Small Change” with a note that said, “I am honored to give you your new favorite album.”

I went even further than that, actually. The first time I visited him in New Orleans, he took me to a bar where the cops hang out. (“Don’t mention you’re a journalist,” he said, which was a joke, but not really.) It was one of those epic nights. The whole bar singing to the Pogues. And when I got back to New York, I sent a gift to the guy who runs the place. Two Tom Waits albums, because the jukebox had a few empty sleeves, and I wrote something like, “These CDs are looking for a home in a smoky dive bar in the French Quarter. Maybe you can help them out.”

I was so pleased with myself, but it didn’t go the way I planned. The guy who runs the bar is a big Irish cop with a mustache — he is exactly the person you see in your head when I say “Irish cop”  – and the next time I saw him at the bar, he said to me, “Yeah, I listened to those CDs you sent. They sucked.”

I laughed, but I was scrambling to cover up my embarrassment. How could I have misjudged this so badly? I clapped my hand on his shoulder. “I feel like I’ve given you a fine Scotch, and you’ve pissed all over it.”

He looked around. “Do you see any fine Scotch around here?” He stuck his cigar back between his teeth. “Van Fucking Halen,” he told me, and walked off.

So there you go. There is a world of difference between the men who love Tom Waits and the men who live the life he writes about. When the detective broke up with me, four months later, it occurred to me I was on the wrong side of the divide.

- – - – - -

In 2006, Tom Waits appeared on “The Daily Show.” Jon Stewart seemed uncharacteristically nervous. “I was struck when I met your wife, your family, how unbeaten by life you are,” Jon Stewart said at the top of the interview. “I used to listen to your music and think, boy, I’d like to lie in the street nearly dead with that guy.”

Waits nods. “It’s an act,” he says.

And I remember feeling weirdly betrayed by that. I mean, I knew it was an act, but maybe I didn’t? Nobody can ravage their body the way he purported to and then stick around for four decades. So of course Waits was sober. Of course he no longer smoked. But it was impossible to imagine him without the neon glint, the clang of empty bottles in the background. Consider: Tom Waits on a treadmill. Consider: Tom Waits juicing. Consider: Tom Waits, happy family man.

It was impossible to imagine my life without such wicked accouterments, too. I put off quitting drinking for as long as I could, but in 2010, I had to stop before my life tipped into parody, the 36-year-old drunk woman all dressed up and falling down. Since then I have been forced to wrestle with so many false delusions, like the one in which every romance comes with a pack of smokes, or the one in which I spend each night sinking into a vodka tonic, cold and fizzy and fantastic.

Sometimes I feel embarrassed that I loved Tom Waits so much. I talk to cool women who defined themselves by the riot girl sound, or Patti Smith, and I think, why wasn’t I like that? Maybe the embarrassment I feel isn’t about Waits at all. It’s about the girl who tried so hard to be someone she wasn’t, the girl who languished in her own self-pity, who posed so many ways for those boys to see. Those boys are all nearing middle age now. They have wives and children and mortgages and, if I had to guess, some nicotine gum lying around somewhere. I’m still friends with most of them. I wonder what they hear when they listen to Tom Waits.

I’ve heard that Waits doesn’t like those old songs, the songs pre-Brennan, and I wonder if what he feels is the tweak of regret and loss we all feel when we stumble on old pictures of ourselves. Not long ago I found a cache of them — me with a Marlboro Light in one hand and a giant margarita glass tilted dangerously in the other, me with a Dos Equis wearing a see-through undershirt staring at the camera like I’m trying to start a fight — and I laugh at those pictures at the same time I feel grief, and this is one of the qualities in Tom Waits I have long appreciated, the way a good feeling can get wrapped up with a painful one. I feel sad for all that I didn’t know then, but I feel grateful that I forged ahead anyway. I feel sad that it’s gone now, but grateful that I had it. I feel sad that I spent so many hours wanting those guys to love me in a certain way — all that time and energy and agony wishing the world could be something it was not — but I feel grateful that they did love me, all of them, in the way they knew how.

On Wednesday, Rose quashed any speculation about a reunion with a two-page open letter in which he announced he wouldn’t be attending Saturday’s induction ceremony in Cleveland. Furthermore, he “respectfully decline my induction as a member of Guns N’ Roses to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. I strongly request that I not be inducted in absentia and please know that no one is authorized nor may anyone be permitted to accept any induction for me or speak on my behalf. Neither former members, label representatives nor the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame should imply whether directly, indirectly or by omission that I am included in any purported induction of ‘Guns N’ Roses.’”

In a puzzling contradiction, he closed the letter by “sincerely thank[ing] the board for their nomination and their votes for Guns’ induction.” (In response to this lengthy statement, the Rock Hall simply said: “We are sorry Axl will not be able to accept his Induction in person.” Rose’s refusal to play by the rules isn’t a surprise; the band built its legacy on flouting convention.

The mercurial personalities of the most popular GNR lineup boozed hard (and, in some cases, drugged hard), played hard and made rock & roll truly dangerous again. Musically, the band’s predilection for danger was also its biggest asset. “Appetite For Destruction” — which has sold over 18 million copies in the U.S. alone — was aggressive, hungry and subversive. A distillation of Aerosmith’s sleazy boogie, the Rolling Stones’ strut, AC/DC and Rose Tattoo’s jagged metal and L.A.’s ever-present glam-rock and punk scenes, “Appetite” was an antidote to the glossy arena-metal popular at the time and remains a landmark album. GNR set fire to complacency — and merged authentic punk attitude with hard rock’s swagger better than any other band to date.

“G N’ R Lies,” an eight-song EP released in late 1988, capitalized on the band’s meteoric rise. It also revealed their depth: “Lies’” single, “Patience,” was acoustic and subdued — the polar opposite of “Appetite’s” snarling fury. While nearly all hard rock bands in the ‘80s had a token sensitive tune, “Patience” was spare and vulnerable, and devoid of the self-indulgence found on other introspective songs.

Conventional wisdom goes that Nirvana’s 1991 major-label debut, “Nevermind,” and the ensuing alternative nation onslaught cemented hair metal’s extinction. But GNR inflicted the first wound; sonically, “Appetite” and “Lies” primed mainstream music to be open to Nirvana’s raw angst and metallic punk. (Ironic, given there was no love lost between Kurt Cobain and Axl Rose; YouTube teems with clips of each man disparaging the other.

Not that the mainstream welcomed GNR with open arms. Even after signing with Geffen, they weren’t instant superstars. In an article titled “Full Metal Racket!” which appeared in Billboard’s 1987 year-end issue, Bon Jovi, Poison and Whitesnake received generous write-ups, while Axl and Co. were merely described as an “up-and-coming band making a buzz,” along with MSG, Faster Pussycat and T.N.T. At that point, “Appetite” had been in stores for five months.

More important, according to Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks’ recent book, “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story Of The Music Video Revolution,” MTV only started playing the “Appetite” single “Welcome To The Jungle” in regular rotation after David Geffen personally called the channel and asked them to play the video more. After “Jungle” and the more accessible “Sweet Child O’ Mine” video caught on with viewers, GNR exploded. And with that, their tenure as wildly creative video artists commenced.

In fact, the enduring legacy of 1991’s “Use Your Illusion I” and “Use Your Illusion II” (both of which just so happened to be released a week before “Nevermind”) is their videos. Shot in stark black-and-white, “Yesterdays” splices photos of the band’s younger days with simple performance footage taken from a warehouse. The clip for the livewire metallic-punk blast “Garden Of Eden,” in contrast, is subtly funny: Shot from one vantage point, it features Rose motormouthing the lyrics with exaggerated movements, as his band shreds behind him. The hard-rock ripper “You Could Be Mine” is tied to the soundtrack of “Terminator 2: Judgment Day”; footage from the movie and of a bad-ass Arnold Schwarzenegger heightens its impact. And “Dead Horse” and GNR’s version of Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Live And Let Die,” while somewhat pedestrian performance videos, demonstrate the band’s immense power as a live act.

“Illusion’s” best-known clips are for the trilogy of “Don’t Cry,” “November Rain” and “Estranged,” however. Mini-movies rather than simply music videos — and based around a short story by journalist/writer Del James, a friend of Axl Rose — they were some of the most elaborate clips ever filmed. Exotic, mysterious and expensive, each video reportedly cost over $1 million to make. Critics called the videos self-indulgent, and the imagery and plot points could be obtuse; see the presence of dolphins everywhere in “Estranged.” (Amusingly, “I Want My MTV” quotes the trilogy’s director, Andy Morahan, as saying, “I’ve been asked by students about the metaphorical imagery in those videos, and I’m like, ‘Fuck if I know.’”)

Sitting down to watch the nine-minute-plus videos for “November Rain” and “Estranged” took commitment, but it was something viewers anticipated; the clips’ appearances on MTV weren’t to be missed. They were must-see events, a shared experience — something not found in music videos again until the arrival of Lady Gaga. And like the latter, GNR used the medium in powerful, striking ways. Instead of acting out goofy or scripted storylines, the band kept things eerily parallel to their actual lives, making these videos touching personal documents.

In hindsight, the video trilogy feels like the closing of a chapter, the band looking back on their simpler days. But the original GNR seemed built for implosion, so intense they could only burn brightly for a few years. And now, it’s easy to forget how massive the band were between 1988 and 1993. They toured with Metallica and Aerosmith, headlined stadiums and hobnobbed with their idols; Elton John played piano on “November Rain” with them in 1992 and Queen’s Brian May opened for them on the “Use Your Illusion” tour. And GNR accomplished all this despite unpredictable behavior and ever-increasing internal (and external) conflicts, including riots at concerts in St. Louis and Montreal; uproar over lyrical content that was perceived to be racist, homophobic and violent; very-public bouts of intoxication and rude behavior; chronic lateness and lawsuits. GNR were never safe — and they were never boring.

Perhaps the biggest tribute to the band — and the testament to their singularity — is that nobody has ever managed to duplicate the essence of their music. Radio rock acts such as Buckcherry and Hinder, raunch-rockers such as Nickelback, and Japanese acts X Japan and Dir En Grey can trace their lineage to Axl & Co., and any mainstream band grafting punk’s aggressive tempos to metal’s thrashier side has GNR to thank for kicking the door down first. But the danger dished out by many of these groups is often cartoonish and calculated, a third-rate Xerox of hazardous behavior.

For the last 15 or so years, naysayers and disgruntled fans have viewed GNR the same way: a pale imitation of their former selves. Besides Rose, only keyboardist Dizzy Reed — who joined the band in 1990 — has a link to GNR’s salad days; the rest of the lineup includes superb players with impressive résumés. However, these newer musicians don’t have the notorious reputations — or drama-filled lives  —of the golden-age lineup. To purists, the band’s continued existence with people who aren’t the classic-era quintet has spoiled the band’s legacy.

But the possibility of something unexpected, exciting and controversial remains omnipresent in GNR’s universe, especially because Rose is at the band’s center. The frontman is one of the last true rock & roll stars, a celebrity whose erratic behavior and grandiose gestures weren’t (and aren’t) calculated to get him a reality show. He’s not worried about how others perceive his actions; frankly, he courts bad publicity. And Rose is unique in the cult of celebrity: His life is shrouded in mystery, and his motives remain elusive, which is refreshing (and odd) in a society where life doesn’t happen unless it’s documented. Even his official Twitter, @axlrose, doesn’t give too much away.

It’s a shrewd stance, this secrecy, one which has kept the band compelling. Rose has guaranteed the myth of GNR still overshadows their reality. And isn’t the latter a hallmark of all great rock & roll bands? In fact, there’s something admirable about Rose sticking to his guns and refusing to give in to nostalgia. GNR never did what they were “supposed” to do — and still don’t — which is how they shook rock & roll out of the doldrums. Even if Rose chooses not to participate in formal recognition of his accomplishments, that doesn’t change how vital GNR is to the evolution of rock & roll.