I find it very hard these days to make sense out of what people mean when they say right wing or left wing. Once upon a time, it never seemed complicated at all. The world looked like two clear groups: the good guys and the bad guys. It seemed as straightforward as a cowboy movie. Music, strangely enough, felt the same way to me for a long stretch of life. There were the songs that mattered, and then there was everything else, which I could dismiss as shallow or false. Even as my sense of politics began to blur and dissolve into contradictions, music still gave me that sense of certainty. Over time, though, the neat categories, gave way to a more complicated landscape. Now I can’t easily separate heroes from villains, because I can’t unsee how much lives in the mess of contradiction and improvisation.