Disclosure: My father, a drummer named Jimmy Curtis, fell in love with Opal Jewel in the summer of 1970. For the duration of their affair he was married to my mother, who in ’71 got pregnant with me. Before my birth, before the world had a chance to know much about my father beyond these facts, he was beaten to death by a racist gang during the riot at Rivington Showcase. And before my mother could bury his broken body, his mistress blazed to stardom.

This is a personal history that, throughout my life, I have taken significant pains to conceal. In my twenty-five years as a journalist, I’ve never needed to lean on it. I got here under my own steam—toured the world’s most dazzling arenas with U2; won awards for following funny money raised by benefit concerts; even interviewed artists who, oblivious of my connections, cited Opal Jewel and Nev Charles, together and solo, as their heroes: Santigold, the White Stripes, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, to name just a few. All this work I’ve compiled as S. Sunny Shelton, the name I put to legal papers on my eighteenth birthday. My chosen name—this hard-earned byline—cobbles together the first initial of my birth name, my favorite word as a child, and the Philadelphia street where the umber facade of my maternal grandmother’s row house decays, flake by flake. You could say that every decision I’ve made to divorce myself from the violent birth of Opal & Nev has been like this: intentional, and a touch paranoid.

So, you ask, what the hell am I doing now, writing the foreword for a story I swore I’d never tell? I could justify my involvement in this project by explaining that the internet and cable news have changed the game for journalists, stretching the boundaries of what’s possible and upending all the rules we thought we knew. I could tell you that in this new era, readers and television audiences now accept, even expect, a flavoring of bias.