I would love to know his taste in music.

I don’t know the reasons for denying his release, but there’s a great HBO documentary about the parole system called Nature of the Crime. Even though parole hearings are ostensibly based on a prisoner’s behavior, attitude, rehabilitation, improvement, etc. they often get denied simply because the crime was a brutal one. Unfortunately they can never go back and change the nature of the crime, so they’re at the whim of the parole board.