I will probably never write my memoirs...

But this could be a start:

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there was my apartment in North Portland, on Killingsworth Street. It was on the second floor of a turn-of-the century brick building, with new deep green carpets and a mustard yellow kitchen. Every night I would ride the bus home from my call-center job downtown, cook up some Ramen or Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, sink into my rummage-sale leather love-seat, and turn on my brand new Denon CD player. I didn’t have a TV.

It was 2004 then. Digital music had already cut deep into the sales of compact discs, but I was intent on preserving the album as art form. My friend Joel Dunham, who was getting his MBA from Oregon State at the time, had started writing album reviews for a website, and had convinced me that I should join him in creating a rival to Pitchforkmedia.com. I remember, I was listening to a lot of Sufjan Stevens and Arcade Fire at the time, and thinking up superlative bloviations like:

Whether Win Butler, Régine Chassagne, and their bandmates in The Arcade Fire were attempting to make a philosophical statement about the loss of the utopian ideal or merely an aesthetic one, they’ve accomplished both with their debut album, Funeral. Their Quebecois environs may look utopian to all the newly disaffected youths this side of the 49th parallel, faced as we are with four more years of rampant absurdity, a stagnant economy producing fewer and fewer jobs, and perpetual war necessitated by the perpetual hate of our ever vigilant nemeses. But the dark spirituality of Funeral hints at an existential turmoil far more fundamental than that caused by mere political division.

And:

On Illinois, Sufjan Stevens has taken his "50 States" concept, inaugurated on 2003's Michigan, well over the top of anything resembling tasteful restraint. Surprisingly, he successfully circumvents all the usual badges of artistic credibility such as detachment and a simplistic, often stultifying sense of "purity," instead tackling this conceptual project with reckless abandon and personal investment. The result betrays Stevens' unique ability to craft complex soundscapes that are not only thoroughly pleasing to the aesthetic senses and occasionally even danceable, but also completely free from pretension.

I remember the first time I heard Chicago, my favorite track from that album. It was a couple months before I moved to Philadelphia. Stevens was playing at Dante’s in downtown Portland. Joel and I had weaseled our way into free admission from the promoter, under the ostensible pretense of interviewing Stevens for our website. The first opener, Denison Witmer, was a guitar-toting troubadour, who wrote an entire album about moving to Philadelphia and was, at the time, dating the daughter of the homiletics professor at the tiny Conservative Christian liberal-arts college nestled snuggly away in a forgotten corner of the Allegheny mountains, far from all the dangers of urban life, from which I had graduated only a year before.

The second opening act was Joanna Newsom. Joel and I, in our critical furor fueled by Czech pilsner, jumped to the premature conclusion that she was a fraud. In hindsight, I now understand that she is not only a genuine artist, but that she played a part in one of those existentially important moments that happen rarely in life. She was perhaps the most angelic musician Stevens could have found to descend on Dante’s that night. Joanna Newsom playing her harp, Denison Witmer beckoning me to the city of brotherly love, and, of course, Sufjan Stevens himself, prophesying of places we had been and places we would go: “I was in love with a place in my mind, in my mind. I made a lot of mistakes in my mind, in my mind. if I was crying in the van, with my friend, it was for freedom from myself and from the land. I made a lot of mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes. I made a lot of mistakes.”