Hearing that Alex Chilton died is a total stop-everything moment. I should be going to bed right now, but I can’t stop thinking about how much he meant to me as a musician and a songwriter. How I teared up the first time I went to see Big Star — at the Metro in Chicago in 1999, because I was negative-2 years old when #1 Record came out. How I’ve heard something like 178 cover versions of “Thirteen” over the last twenty years and how none of them sucked because the song was that perfect. I never considered a world without Alex Chilton, and it’s going to take me some time to process this.