Boston Globe music critic Matthew Guerrieri loves classical music enough to have written a whole book about just a couple seconds’ worth of sounds—The First Four Notes: Beethoven’s Fifth and the Human Imagination. But in the Zócalo green room he revealed that he occasionally cheats on his longtime love with pop: the first album he ever bought on casette was Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

Neither Michael Jackson nor Beethoven had much of a love life. On The Colbert Report last week, Guerrieri revealed that his tunes didn’t get Beethoven anywhere with the ladies—although the composer may have liked it that way.

But even if the women of his time weren’t feeling it, Beethoven knew how good he was, explained Guerrieri when he visited Zócalo in Phoenix back in December.