Pete Lit

Song of the Week: Crash Test Dummies

Crash Test Dummies: Superman's Song

Crash Test Dummies are best known for their one hit, "MMM MMM MMM MMM", but while I only know of two other songs of theirs, both are far superior to their hit: a cover of the Replacements' "Androgynous", and this ode to the Man of Steel. While the obvious highlight of the song is the impossibly deep voice of frontman Brad Roberts, the lyrics are quite sharp as well:

Tarzan wasn't a ladies' man
He'd just come along and scoop 'em up under his arm
Like that, quick as a cat in the jungle
But Clark Kent now there was a real gent
He would not be caught sittin' around in no
Junglescape, dumb as an ape doing nothing

Superman never made any money
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy
And sometimes I despair the world will never see
Another man like him

Hey Bob, Supe had a straight job
Even though he could have smashed through any bank
In the United States, he had the strength, but he would not
Folks said his family were all dead
Their planet crumbled but Superman, he forced himself
To carry on, forget Krypton, and keep going

Tarzan was king of the jungle and Lord over all the apes
But he could hardly string together four words: "I Tarzan, You Jane. "

Sometimes when Supe was stopping crimes
I'll bet that he was tempted to just quit and turn his back
On man, join Tarzan in the forest
But he stayed in the city, and kept on changing clothes
In dirty old phonebooths till his work was through
And nothing to do but go on home

Having only minimal familiarity with the band, I hadn't thought of Crash Test Dummies in years. But recently I picked up the first two issues of Mark Russell's Superman Stories, a very funny and thought-provoking zine which imagines the everyday life of Superman. Sure, he has superpowers, but he has plenty of human weaknesses too - a violent temper, emotional impenetrability, boredom and much more. I strongly encourage you to give Russell a read.

And pondering the less-than-super traits of Superman that Russell writes about couldn't help but remind me of this wonderful song. I hope you enjoy both.

Replacements Reissued!

Every defunct band seems to be getting the reissue treatment these days, including the great Replacements, whose first four records (Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out the Trash; The Replacements Stink; Hootenany; and Let It Be) have been re-released by the ever-wonderful Rhino Records. Pitchfork reviews all four here. Learning that each reissue includes bonus tracks brought a smile to my face, since it brought to mind the following gem from the 1989 edition of the Trouser Press Record Guide (remember that in 1989 the transition from vinyl to CD was still underway):

Although four Replacements albums are out on CD, not one of them includes a bonus track. Bastards.

With passages like that, it's no wonder I've revered that book for so many years. If for some inexplicable reason you've never heard Let It Be, then for heaven's sake snatch up this reissue as fast as humanly possible. Truly one of the greatest rock albums ever made.

Song of the Week: The Feelies

The Feelies: "Dancing Barefoot"

Anybody who's been reading this blog for more than a few days knows I'm a huge fan of the Feelies. My ardor goes back nearly twenty years, from the moment I picked up a budget-priced vinyl copy of Only Life at Record City in Skokie, which is now long gone but where for several years I spent many a lunch hour while working in the area. Then it was their 1986 masterpiece The Good Earth, and lastly their good-but-not-great finale, Time For a Witness. (Oddly enough, I never picked up their debut Crazy Rhythms though I'm fairly familiar with most of it.) I missed the opportunity to see them on their final tour, in 1991, when they played at the Vic the night before I was leaving town on a fishing trip. Looking back, I would gladly have traded the extra exhaustion the next day for seeing this great band in their prime. Regrets.

The Feelies always had impeccable taste in covers, with their albums, EPs and B-sides including their takes on the Beatles' "Everybody's Got Something To Hide (Except For Me and My Monkey)" and "She Said She Said", the Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black", the Velvet Underground's "What Goes On" and "White Light White Heat", Neil Young's "Sedan Delivery" and Iggy Pop's "Real Cool Time". (All but one of their albums closed with a cover - and Feelies' frontman Glenn Mercer continued the tradition on his recent solo album, with a medley of two George Harrison-penned tunes, "Within You, Without You" and "Love You To.")

All of this is a long-winded way of pointing to the tune I've linked to above, the band's cover of Patti Smith's "Dancing Barefoot", with bassist Brenda Sauter taking a rare lead vocal. I'm mostly familiar with Smith's song from the U2 version that saturated alternative rock radio in the early 1990s, but I'm quite pleased to realize that the Feelies did it even better. What I love about their version is that while it's unmistakably the Patti Smith classic, it's also pure, quintessential Feelies - the strummed rhythm guitar, the rich lead guitar, the crisp percussion, the subdued vocal delivery. The band took a very familiar tune and made it their own, which is how all great covers are. Terrific.

Intimations of Mortality from Recollections of Early Adulthood*

Yesterday marked a significant turning point in my life. Now, for the first time since I was 19 years old - I'm now 42 - I am without a stereo. It's been a long time coming, but yesterday finally settled the matter. Last fall we had major renovations done on our family room, with new hardwood floors installed and the room repainted. In preparation we cleared everything out of the room, which included my disassembling the stereo that resided in the entertainment cabinet. The stereo was stored in the sun porch (which is closed off for the winter) along with other items from the family room, but even though the work was finished by November, I never got around to putting all the stuff back. Yesterday I finally did so, with everything put back in place but the stereo. It sat there, dusty and forlorn, on the dining room floor as I inwardly debated what to do with it.

That stereo had been a big part of my life for the better part of two decades. It was my first major purchase as an independent adult. After getting by with an inherited turntable and cheap speakers (no receiver or tape deck) during my freshman year in college, during the following summer I went to Pacific Stereo in Schaumburg and splurged on what was then a pretty nice setup - an Onkyo analog receiver, Technics turntable, Sony cassette deck and a wonderfully oversized pair of EPI speakers. Though I upgraded in later years, replacing the Sony with a Nakamichi deck and entering the digital age in 1989 with a Denon CD player, that orignal core setup was the source of untold hours of listening pleasure. Whenever I would move into a new apartment, the stereo would be the first thing taken out and set up. Clothes might not be unpacked for a few days, and kitchen utensils for weeks or even months, but from my first hour in that apartment the stereo would be fully functional and most likely cranking out music as I settled into the new digs. At one time I could have told you the first music I played in any given new place, and though I've forgotten the rest by now I can still reliably report that when I moved into my apartment in Roscoe Village in 1996 the first thing I listened to was a sampler disc from CMJ New Music Monthly that included the Apples in Stereo, which was soon supplemented by The Lounge Ax Defense and Relocation Compact Disc which was purchased on the evening of my move.

In short, that stereo was my constant companion which, due to its complete unportability, meant I was home a lot. As much as I like to fondly recall the few crazy nights of too much drinking and too little responsible behavior from those days, for the most part I was a homebody. Which is all fine. It's who I am, and who I'll always be. That stereo got me through countless hours that were solitary but not necessarily lonely.

Which brings us to yesterday. My passion for music is nowhere near what it once was, and though I still listen a lot I do so almost exclusively online, or with my iPod or laptop, or in the car. The stereo has languished during recent years, especially since my daughter was born, as I've opted for the more modern and convenient modes of listening. As I looked at the stereo sitting there on the dining room floor, wires disconnected and looking quite aged, I finally realized that its time had passed. One by one I lugged the components up to the attic, where I returned them safely to their original boxes which I've kept for all these years. So while I haven't discarded the stereo completely, up there in the attic it's very much out of sight, out of mind, and most likely I'll never listen to it again.

As I undertook this sober act yesterday, my wife sensed what was going on inside my head. I finally made an attempt at a lighthearted comment, saying in mock-solemn tones that I had reached a major turning point in my life. She was an English major in college, and in response she laughed and said "Oh, okay, Prufrock." She specifically cited Eliot's line "Do I dare to eat a peach?", which got me thinking of the entire stanza. A quick perusal of the Norton Anthology brought these once-familiar verses back to mind:

I grow old…I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

Quite a reflection on aging and mortality, that was. But never mind. Despite the somber mood of all of the above, there's no need to worry about me. I've moved on with my life. And I'll still hear the mermaids singing, each to each - just not via my Onyko TX-21 analog receiver.

(*My deepest apologies to Wordsworth. The Prufrock comment got me nostalgic for the few poems I remember from my British lit class. Here's to you, Dr. Cole, wherever you are.)

Song of the Week: The 6ths

The 6ths: "Falling Out of Love With You"

The 6ths was one of the numerous projects of songwriter extraordinaire Stephin Merritt (best known for the Magnetic Fields) in which various indie rock luminati were recruited to sing Merritt's songs, with singers like Lou Barlow, Barbara Manning, Chris Knox, Bob Mould and Gary Numan interpreting the songs to Merritt's synth-pop instrumental backing on two albums released in 1995 and 2000. I originally dove into Songza looking for "Heaven In a Black Leather Jacket", a wonderful 6ths tune sung by Robert Scott of the Bats, which I've owned on a vinyl seven-inch since the mid 1990s. No luck there, but I did find the charming "Falling Out of Love With You", with vocals by Dean Wareham of Galaxie 500/Luna (semi-)fame. I've been a fan of Wareham for a long time, though for his guitar work and admittedly not his vocals. But he does quite well on this song, I think.

Wareham has been getting a fair amount of press lately, with his rock memoir Black Postcards having just been published. Guest reviewer Tim Frederick gave the book a glowing assessment recently at Largehearted Boy. Sounds like a good one, and a refreshing break from all the narcissistic, here's-all-the-drugs-and-women-I-did Rock God dreck out there.

Song of the Week: The Pogues

The Pogues: "The Body of an American"

(What, with as much as I go on and on about the Pogues, which Irish band do you think I'd feature this week? U2? Hah!)

This is one of my very favorite Pogues songs (standing proudly alongside "Thousands Are Sailing", "Young Ned of the Hill" and "Streams of Whiskey"). It just might be the quintessential Pogues song - the gently beautiful intro and outro, the rollicking middle portion and singalong chorus, Shane MacGowan's rapid-fire vocals and touching lyrics about the immigrant experience, all of it centered around a drunken Irish wake. The line "At five o'clock in the evening every bastard there was piskey" never fails to bring me a smile.

"The Body of an American" first appeared the vinyl-only EP Poguetry in Motion back in the eighties and, as was the case with most EPs during the later digital age, became somewhat of an orphan, all but unavailable on CD (other than perhaps a few Pogues greatest-hits collections which were superfluous to me, who already owned all the full-length albums). I've owned the EP for ages, having scoured it out of some long-gone used record store, and loved this song so much that I contemplated going to all the trouble of having the EP converted to digital. Then, a few years back, the great Rhino Records resissued the band's Rum, Sodomy and the Lash and was wise enough to append Poguetry and two more bonus tracks to the reissue. And am I ever glad they did - the song sounds as great as ever. Poor old Jim Dwyer.

Happy St. Patrick's day, everyone! Slainte!

Song of the Week: Pete Townshend

Pete Townshend: "Save It For Later"

The Who was the first rock band I ever really latched onto, during my junior year in high school. My best friend Mike was an obsessive fan of the band, but despite the addictiveness of his mania I only took a few tentative steps into the water, first with the soundtrack album for The Kids Are Alright, and then a few of the studio albums. My Who collection swelled to about eight albums over the next few years, and though I finally sold them all off as my tastes moved elsewhere, I never stopped appreciating the band. One of the very greatest, I think.

The song above is Pete Townshend's solo version of "Save It For Later", the old English Beat hit. (This was a bonus track [1] from his post-Who solo album White City.) I really like how Townshend strips away the pop sheen of the original to reveal the emotional longing beneath.

[1] You see, youngsters, back in the old days when the record companies were trying to get music fans to convert their collections from vinyl LPs to the new-fangled CDs, they would re-release albums on CD with "bonus tracks" which didn't appear on the original LP. This way they hoped you'd fork over fifteen bucks for an album you already owned. The bonus tracks weren't always worth the extra money, though in the case of Townshend and "Save It For Later" it was very much worth it.

Song of the Week: The Long Ryders

The Long Ryders: "Looking for Lewis and Clark"

As I've mentioned before, the Long Ryders were a critical link between the pioneering country rock of the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers and the early alternative country bands like Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks. The Long Ryders effectively melded traditional country with garage rock, creating an invigorating hybrid that I never tire of. "Looking for Lewis and Clark" is from the one Long Ryders album I don't own, State of Our Union, and I was quite pleased to find the tune on Songza.

Songza is the key to life. (Sorry.)

My online friend Shaz has pointed me to the wondrous Songza, thereby promising countless hours of musical immersion and a stunning dropoff in the productivity of my already- unproductive weekends. To whit:

Dada: Disneyland

"I just flipped off President George...I'm going to Disneyland!" Where, oh where, has this song been during the last seven, seemingly interminable years?

R.E.M., "Supernatural Superserious"

My passion for R.E.M. has waxed and waned over the years, and while I regularly revisit their older material (I listened to Document several times this week) I admittedly haven't listened to much of the material they've created over the past decade or so. But they've got a new album coming out, Accelerate, which reportedly ups the energy level quite a bit from their last few releases. The video for the first single, "Supernatural Superserious", is now out, and it sounds great. The aching vocals, the chiming guitars, the arty lyrics - it's all there. And it rocks - not the over-the-top extreme of Monster, but just enough. If this song is any indication, the album promises to be a strong return to form.

Nick Lowe is as cool as ever.

Nick Lowe's timeless power pop masterpiece Jesus of Cool has been deluxe-reissued by Yep Roc. (American listeners of a certain age and impeccable taste may remember it as Pure Pop For Now People, as his cowardly American label re-titled it.) It's the original album plus seven bonus tracks, including the original version of "Cruel To Be Kind" (which I own on 45, having found a used copy of it at the long-gone Aurora Vintage Records sometime around 1988.) The full album stream is here, and a strong review at Popmatters here.

Indeed, that poor Marie Provost did not look her best the day the cops busted into her lonely nest...

Mountain Goats, "Sax Rohmer #1"

Behold the latest video from the Mountain Goats, of "Sax Rohmer #1", from the forthcoming album Heretic Pride. What fascinating images those are, even though all those scrolling lyrics did have me a bit woozy. If there's a smarter artist working in popular music today than John Darnielle, it would be news to me.

Darnielle, by the way, has penned a book for the great 33 1/3 series, on Black Sabbath's Master of Reality, which is coming out in April. Reading Darnielle's blog over the years, I've always been fascinated that a folkie like him could be so deeply into heavy metal, so I'm not at all surprised to see him writing about Sabbath. If you're as intrigued about this as I am, follow this link for directions on obtaining a free .pdf sampler of the book.

Timeless words...

When one voice rules the nation
Just because they're top of the pile
Doesn't mean their vision is the clearest
The voices of the people
Are falling on deaf ears
Our politicians all become careerists

They must declare their interests
But not their company cars
Is there more to a seat in parliament
Than sitting on your arse
And the best of all this bad bunch
Is shouting to be heard
Above the sound of ideologies clashing

Outside the patient millions
Who put them into power
Expect a little more back for their taxes
Like school books, beds in hospitals
And peace in our bloody time
All they get is old men grinding axes

Who've built their private fortunes
On the things they can rely
The courts, the secret handshake
The Stock Exchange and the old school tie
For God and Queen and Country
All things they justify
Above the sound of ideologies clashing

God bless the civil service
The nations saving grace
While we expect democracy
They're laughing in our face
And although our cries get louder
The laughter gets louder still
Above the sound of ideologies clashing

Above the sound of ideologies,
Above the sound of ideologies,
Above the sound of ideologies clashing

-Billy Bragg, "Ideology"

(My iPod's battery is either dying or dead, so I haven't carried it to work in over six months. Just this morning I was trying to remember the words to "Ideology" to sing to myself as I walked from my train to the office, but realized I had forgotten most of the second verse. A quick web search, and now all the words are firmly re-lodged in my head. And so, fellow Heritage Corridor Metra commuters, you've been warned.)

The Riches of Rykodisc Revealed

The venerable record label Rykodisc is celebrating its 25th anniversary, with a great offer to listeners: just register with the label, and every month this year you'll be able to download five selected tunes from their hefty back catalog, ALL FOR FREE.

I just signed up, and January's tunes are from Ali Farke Toure & Ry Cooder, King Sunni Ade, Baka Beyond, Toumani Diabate and Taj Mahal with Toumani Diabate. Admittedly, I haven't listened to much Afrobeat - or whatever it's called - since that one Ladysmith Black Mambazo album I bought twenty years ago in the inevitable post-Graceland euphoria, but I'm looking forward to hearing all of these tunes. And their roster of artists is stupendously diverse, so I'm sure many more musical styles are on the way.

You really can't go wrong with this offer, so join today!

Ska's not just for grownups any more.

If this doesn't get the kids to tidy up, then nothing will.

Seeing this reminds me of back when my daughter Maddie was a toddler, and was enamored of a TV commercial which had the Specials' "Monkey Man" as background music. (Can't remember what the product was.) I owned the Specials CD on which that song first appeared, so I cued up that track for her to hear. She seemed to like it at first, but then became increasingly intimidated by the volume I was playing it back at on the stereo. By the time I made the mistake of switching to another tune (probably something like "Gangsters"), the novelty had completely worn off for her. Julie, being the much more sensitive and sensible parent of the two of us, tensely called across the room that I was scaring the poor little girl. Deservedly chastised, I clicked off the stereo, and kept the volume at a reasonable from that point on.

(Via Boing Boing.)

New tune from Bob Mould

The esteemed Bob Mould has released "The Silence Between Us", a solid tune from his new album District Line. Some interesting sonic twists are in there that I wouldn't necessarily have expected from him, but he's definitely keeping things fresh. Part of me wonders, longingly, if he'll ever revisit the fury of his Hüsker Dü days. Probably not. All of us mature, mellow and move on - and he seems to be doing all of those things particularly well. Reading his periodic blog posts, it appears he's living a full, rewarding and healthy life, and I'm pleased he's been able to move beyond the darkness.

Dancing with M.

Following up on my previous commentary on M. Ward's The Transfiguration of Vincent: the album consists entirely of Ward's originals, with the charming exception of a cover of David Bowie's "Let's Dance". Ward strips out all of the bombast, hit-seeking overproduction and dance rythyms of the original to somehow reveal a delicate and touching love song. Here's a live version of Ward's cover, as originally broadcast on KVRX. Bowie should have tried such a winningly subtle approach to the song himself back in 1983, were he not so intent on being a chart-topping rockstar back then.

(Via Largehearted Boy.)

Song of the Month: M. Ward

I've been quite remiss in regularly updating the "Listening" section of my sidebar - so much so that I'll now be calling the updating post "Song of the Month" instead of "Song of the Week." The latest song is "A Voice at the End of the Line" by M. Ward. I came around to this charming and gentle song in a rather interesting manner.

I've admired Ward for a while now, and very much enjoyed his second album End of Amnesia but for whatever reason never got around to purchasing any subsequent releases. I did accumulate a few MP3s, including "A Voice at the End of the Line", but was less than impressed with the tracks I heard off of Transistor Radio, his fourth album, enough so to put me off of his third, The Transfiguration of Vincent. (Following me so far?) I did like the Vincent tracks well enough to put that album on my Amazon wishlist, but after buying only a handful of CDs over the past several years (iPod reigning supreme) that wishlist had become considerably outdated.

Then on Christmas morning at my mother-in-law's house, my gift pile included two packages which were, beneath their neat and tasteful wrapping, unmistakably CDs. My mother-in-law knows virtually nothing about my musical tastes, so I figured she must have pulled up that mostly outdated Amazon wishlist. As the rest of the family took turns opening their gifts, I racked my brains over what exactly I had in that list. I could only remember a few, and upon finally opening those two packages I was thrilled to see The Mekons Rock n' Roll (I've truly wanted this on CD, literally for fifteen years) but only moderately pleased to see The Transfiguration of Vincent. Though I've loved the Mekons forever, I had assumed my appreciation for M. Ward had all but passed.

Well, I'm pleased and pleasantly surprised to report that I'm now halfway through my second listen of Vincent and am really enjoying it. It's slightly more folk-rock (that is, more uptempo and with a full band) than the acoustic folk of End of Amnesia, but there are still plenty of moments of quiet introspection, old-timey and idiosyncratic instrumentation, and Ward's craggy and timeless vocals to be very satisfying. This album is probably one of those "growers" and, as it turns out, I'm very glad to own it. (Thanks, Carroll!) And now I'm sharing one small slice of the album with you. Enjoy.

It's the end of the world as we know it...

...and Dubya feels fine. Quite clever, though I'm guessing the creators faked at least a few of the lines, particularly "Lenny Bruce" and "Lester Bangs." It's hard to imagine Bush ever mentioning either of those names in public.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Hüsker Dü and Portland

At her NPR-based blog, Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein muses over bands that exemplify her city, Portland. She suggests Hüsker Dü were Portlanders in spirit...

So, it's not just the bands who reside in our cities and towns, or who transplant themselves there, that make up the noises that represent our topography or our internal and external landscapes. After all, the chainsaw distortion of Husker Du's guitar sounds conjure the felling of trees as much as Soundgarden embodies our half lit winter months or The Thermals bring to mind a restless frontier.

Well, I'm not sure how Grant Hart and Greg Norton fit in, but at least Bob Mould's imposing physical presence certainly did conjure up images of grizzly bears.

Weekend Multimedia

The Good:
Merge Records is reissuing the first three indie albums by the long-lost Big Dipper, along with a never-released album from late in the band's career, as the four-disc Supercluster: The Big Dipper Anthology. Here's an MP3 of "She's Fetching", and here's the band's MySpace page where you can stream "She's Fetching", "Faith Healer" (GREAT song!), "A Song to Be Beautiful" and "Nowhere to Put My Love." I completely missed out on this band the first time around, and all of their albums have been out of print for years so I haven't been able to catch up until now. The late discovery will be quite pleasant, I suspect.

The Bad and the Ugly:
Someone named Sue Pitkin singing, in her best faux-Karen Carpenter voice, "We've Got It All in Rockford" from Make It In Rockford, a compilation put out during the late 1970s or early 1980s by the Rockford (Illinois) Chamber of Commerce. Civic boosterism has rarely sounded so awful.

The Indeterminate:
Nancy Walker (aka the Bounty paper towel "quicker picker upper" lady) singing "I Hate Men", from the album of the same name.

(Thanks to John Kenyon and Pitchfork for the first item, thanks/blame to WFMU for the last two items.)

Weekend Multimedia

One item this week, one which is sure to warm you up during this frigid weather: six tracks from Rounder Records' new New Orleans anthology, City of Dreams. If none of this gets your chilled blood flowing, you just might be dead.

One correction: Rounder has those first two tracks transposed. The second track is actually the Dirty Dozen Brass Band - I know that for a fact, because I have that very song on a mixtape somewhere - and the first is Bo Dollis and the Wild Magnolias. I also have some history with the final track, Tuts Washington's lovely solo piano instrumental of "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?". I've owned that album (New Orleans Piano Professor) for quite some time now, and years ago - way back in those neanderthal days before electronic voicemail - I had that tune as the background music for the message on my answering machine.

I still miss that answering machine. The geek in me always loved crafting personalized messages accompanied by quirky music from my collection. Once, around Christmas, I made a message that included NRBQ's warped cover of "Here Comes Santa Claus." A friend of mine called me, long-distance, and liked the message so much that he cajoled another friend of his (who I didn't even know) to call, also long-distance, just to hear the message. It was one of my proudest geek moments.

Lou Reed

Quick update to Weekend Multimedia: two new songs by Lou Reed, "Gravity" and "Safety Zone", which are "inspired by the soon-to-be released film NANKING--a powerful and relevant documentary that tells the story of the Japanese invasion of Nanking, China, in the early days of World War II." I particularly like the latter tune - sounds like it came out of his New York and Magic and Loss era, my favorite period of Reed's long and illustrious career.

(Via What to Wear During an Orange Alert?)

"...so little costumery or ornamentation..."

I am a new subscriber to Oxford American, with the first installment of my subscription being their annual music issue. I have a real weakness for serious literary discussions of music (enough so to once brave Greil Marcus - but never mind that), and when those writings are accompanied, as was this issue of OA, by a sampler CD full of wildly diverse music, all of it is impossible to resist. And while magazines-with-CDs aren't uncommon, this disc isn't something that was just slapped together and thrown inside the shrink bag - looking at you, Believer - but instead, each artist is honored with a profile article. The articles are all solid, sturdy, well-informed pieces, but nearly all of them are standard fare written with just enough journalistic distance to prevent any true emotional engagement with the subjects. In other words, professional music writing by professional music writers.

With one wonderful, singular exception: novelist Kevin Brockmeier writing about the country singer Iris Dement. Unlike the other writers here, writing about Dement was clearly much more than a mere assignment for Brockmeier. Instead, Brockmeier has deep feelings for and a strong personal connection to Dement's music, particularly the album he explores in depth, My Life. I recommend reading the entire piece, which unfortunately is not online. One passage in particular struck me. After naming several other "polarizing vocalists" (those whose singing voices take much getting used to) whom he admires, Brockmeier elaborates on Dement's voice:

...Iris is unique among them, however, in that both the people who adore her without qualification and the people who bristle at the very sound of her will point to her voice in explanation. Her voice is, quite simply, where the personality of her music lies, and unless it speaks to you, nothing else she does will register.

It took me a few listens to grow comfortable with the way she sings, but when I did, I quickly realized how expressive her voice could be. It is capable of holding such exultation on the one hand and so much sorrow on the other, with so little costumery or ornamentation, that it can seem as if she has lived an entire life inside each note she delivers. And yet her vocals are always crafted to lend attention to the song rather than herself. She happens to sing well, but beyod that, she sings with the unmistakable stamp of experience, hard-won and cherished, so that the overall effect of her music, no matter how sad, is cleansing, invigorating.

It has always seemed to me that the best singers are the most evocative ones, which is a separate consideration from how conventionally pretty their voices might be...

It brought me great pleasure to read Brockmeier describe her voice in this way because, in doing so, he could just as well be describing Joel R.L. Phelps, another idiosyncratically-voiced singer who has long been one of my favorites. Phelps, as it turns out, admires Dement's work to such a degree that he included not one, but two songs of hers on Inland Empires, his 2001 covers EP. While I had been vaguely familiar with Dement's name for many years, I hadn't heard any of her work until I indirectly heard it through Phelps.

Phelps, like Dement, sings more from his soul than from his intellect, striving to release his emotions without any close attention to technical proficiency. He gets the notes right, for the most part, but the focus is mostly on getting his thoughts and feelings across. And yet, while Phelps' voice may be grating to some, this outpouring of emotion is never done with the slightest bit of bombast. No 20-year-old emo singer here, wailing about his broken heart and empty middle-class upbringing. Like Dement, Phelps has that "unmistakable stamp of experience, hard-won and cherished", and because he seems so real I've never found Joel Phelps' music to be anything less than thoroughly invigorating.

Oh, and of course, the OA sampler disc finally, at long last, formally introduced me to Iris Dement. Her "Sweet Is the Melody", from My Life, is quite lovely indeed. Her voice, despite my narrative above, doesn't seem anywhere near as idiosyncratic as that of Phelps, but still I can very much see Brockmeier's point. She may be smoother around the edges than Phelps, but she's downright rough-hewn compared to all the glossy million-selling country singers out there. Her voice seems genuine, and by extension she seems genuine as a person as well. Hearing this song, I'm not at all surprised that Joel Phelps is such a great fan of hers.

Weekend Multimedia

Film trailer for Persepolis, which looks quite good. The book was one of my wife's favorites of the last several years, and I enjoyed it as well. Marjane Satrapi is a co-director of the film, so this isn't just some cheap Hollywood ripoff, but likely a genuine work of art.

And the trailer for Chicago 10. "Free speech died here," indeed.

Okay, this isn't really multimedia, but I'm passing it along anyway: a new biography of the great Elliott Smith, by Autumn de Wilde. (Then again, reading this book will undoubtedly inspire you to listen to Smith's music, so in a way this is a multimedia item.) There's another Smith bio already out there that I've been contemplating buying for a while now, from an online remainder shop, but it's only had mixed reviews and is written from an outsider perspective. De Wilde, by contrast, had access to Smith's friends and family, and will undoubtedly present a much fuller portrait of the man. And get this: the book also includes "a live CD of unreleased solo acoustic performances." Be still my heart.

Albums In Need of a Diet

Love the concept: the Onion A.V. Club's "21 good albums that could have been great EPs". Called out for flashes-of-brilliance-tainted-with-bloat are the otherwise esteemed likes of R.E.M., Prince, Guided By Voices, Radiohead, Blur, David Bowie, the Ramones, the Replacements, Jeff Buckley, ZZ Top, Journey (okay, they're not all esteemed), Fishbone, Bruce Springsteen, Ryan Adams, the Flaming Lips, the Verve, the Streets, Andrew W.K. (huh?), 50 Cent, Kanye West, the Afghan Whigs. I couldn't agree more on the Replacements' Don't Tell a Soul - if I had mp3-burning capability at the time I sold off that album on eBay, those are exactly the songs I would have kept.

Weekend Multimedia

Though I have a few other items for potential posting here, they'll all just have to wait another week, because this clip deserves to fly solo and, as I'm sure you'll agree, is nothing short of Brazilliant.

Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together

This is probably the first time I've ever said this in my life, and will be the last time as well, but here goes: Damn, I wish I lived in Los Angeles. Sure, the fires and mudslides and smog and impossible traffic and incomprehensible real estate prices wouldn't be at all pleasant, but at least I could have been on hand to witness Ted Leo and the Pharmacists AND the Pogues. What an incredibly inspired pairing.

Ruined Haiku

The website Ruined Music is all about songs that once greatly signified people's romantic relationships, but once those relationships went awry, the people who once loved those songs could no longer bear to listen to them any more. The site recently ran a haiku contest, asking readers to write a haiku based on such a "ruined song."

I entered the contest, but with a 180-degree twist. You see, I don't at all fit the profile of the typical Ruined Music contributor, since I was never really in love until I met Julie - and we've now been together for over ten years and will be for the rest of our lives. In other words, I never had (and never will have) a bitter breakup that permanently ruined a song that was inextricably linked to that relationship. But I entered the contest anyway, with the twist being that I chose a great "breakup song" that was forever nullified when Julie and I got together. One of my favorite breakup songs is Yo La Tengo's "I Was The Fool Beside You For Too Long" which, now that I have Julie, will never truly resonate with me emotionally. So, in a way, this breakup song was "ruined" for me by finding the love of my life. (And, of course, I'm eternally grateful for the song being ruined in such a pleasant manner.)

Hence, I penned this haiku:

"I was the fool be-
side you for too long." Not true.
Still here, loving it.

Weekend Multimedia

Just one item this week - and you'll thank me for being brief, since after just a few minutes of this you probably won't be able to listen to anything for the rest of the day - but it's a wonderful, awful gem. While there's some dispute over whether the culprit was a tape played back at the wrong frequency or a live keyboardist playing the snyth part of "Jump" in the wrong key, there's no argument whatsoever that the result was a "trainwreck" and an "atonal mess". Hard to believe that a song that was so bad to begin with could be made to sound even worse, but the geezers of Van Halen managed to pull it off. Nice job, ya old farts.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Weekend Multimedia

On Sound Opinions, Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis dissect one of rock's greatest albums (and one of my favorites), the Replacements' Let It Be. The dynamic duo discusses the album with Jim Walsh, Minneapolis scenester and author of The Replacements: All Over But the Shouting. The segment starts at the 20:00 mark of the broadcast. (But shame on you, radio producers, for deleting the word "boner" from the repeated references to the song "Gary's Got a Boner." It's a legitimate word, meaning "a clumsy or stupid mistake." Well, that's one of the definitions, anyway.)

Lest we forget: Nirvana covering Leadbelly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", from the legendary MTV Unplugged broadcast, which is finally being released on DVD. I didn't see this for the first time until years after Cobain's death. At the very end of the song, when Cobain sings "shiver" the final time, he opens his eyes with a look that seemed so vacant and lost that I remember sitting there stunned, saying "My god, he was gone already." What an incredibly powerful moment. Cobain was a truly great and singular artist, and his death was a loss for all of us.

Trailers for the documentaries King Corn and Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten. Both look fascinating - then again, I'd find Joe Strummer reading his grocery list to be fascinating. (Via Coudal.)

Weekend Multimedia

After all but taking last weekend off, this week's offerings are a veritable cavalcade.

PC dominoes. No comment necessary. (Via Boing Boing.)

Irony of ironies: James Dean on driver safety.

Hüsker Dü's video for "Could You Be The One?" Not exactly from their Zen Arcade or Flip Your Wig heyday, but still far better than most what passes for rock and roll these days. (Via Pitchfork.)

Trailer for the upcoming Silkworm documentary, Couldn't You Wait?. Maybe it's just their demise - longing for what can't be recovered - but I'm appreciating the band more and more as the years go on.

Stephin Merritt, of the Magnetic Fields, doing a Volvo ad. Hey, everybody's grabbing for the brass ring these days, and at least it wasn't one of his own songs being compromised. I had seen that commercial a few times before, but hadn't realized it was Merritt.

Shalom Auslander, whose story collection Beware of God was one of my favorite reads of 2006, is back with a memoir, Foreskin's Lament, the wonderful trailer for which is here. (Via Bookslut.)

And turning to the political, we have a somber reminder of U.S. failures - yes, failures - in Afghanistan, on the sixth anniversary of our "intervention." And on a lighter but no less pointed note, the unseemly, wide-stance relationship of Congress and the agribusiness industry. Oink.

Weekend Multimedia

The Clash in 1981, on Tom Snyder's show, being interviewed and performing "The Magnificent Seven". Damn, we'll likely never see the likes of the Clash again.

Chin Up Chin Up is one of the more interesting bands in Chicago, and anywhere in fact. Here's the video for "This Harness Can't Ride Anything", from their most recent release of the same name. An enjoyable artist's depiction of the band - at first it made me think of the Simpsons, but later it did indeed invoke Yellow Submarine. It's always nice to see bands branch out from the conventional "live video of the band performing" format.

I don't know if still images truly qualify as "multimedia", but you know what? This is my blog, and I don't care about such petty distinctions. Hence, witness these gorgeous illustrations by Pascal Blanchet. And while all of them are very much worth browsing, I'd particularly like to point out this one, which quite perfectly captures my Monday mornings.

(Clash link via Coudal, Blanchet link via Drawn!.)

Uncle Knows Best

My friend and fellow writer Richard Grayson remembers his uncle, the renowned klezmer clarinetist Dave Tarras.

When I was a kid, Uncle Dave lived on Tilden Avenue in East Flatbush, just across the street from Tilden High School (closed last June and broken up into smaller schools). At one point my mother decided I should have clarinet lessons and Uncle Dave came over and gamely tried to instruct me.

But I have no musical ability whatsoever and I hated the taste of the reed in my mouth. Although I loved Uncle Dave and wanted to please him, whatever came out of my clarinet must have sounded like a catfight.

After just a few weeks, he said, "You don’t like this, do you?"

I shook my head.

"What do you like to do?"

"I don’t know. . . writing?"

"Then you should write." He went downstairs and told my mother the clarinet was not for me.

I wish my own uncles were as understanding. When I was scraping around after grad school, jobless and living with my parents, my California uncle repeatedly mailed me the help wanted ads from the San Jose Mercury - because he loves California so much that he thinks everyone in the world should live there - and my Ohio uncle tried to recruit me into selling Amway. Thanks, no, I replied both times, as diplomatically as possible.

Weekend Multimedia

I'm starting to realize that this project revolves heavily around music, since I don't go prowling through YouTube looking for quirky, non-music videos. I did, however, find two non-music items to pass along this week. But the music comes first.

First up is a band whose name I can't print here on this family-values blog of mine. But you really have to admire the popup-book-as-music-video concept. It puts that old A-ha pencil sketch video to shame. Well done, gents.

Tim Midgett and Andy Cohen may have brought Silkworm to an end after the senseless death of drummer and longtime friend Michael Dahlquist, but that doesn't at all mean they're finished making music. They're now at it again, under the name Bottomless Pit, in which they're helped out by Chris Manfrin (formerly of Seam, one of my faves) and Brian Orchard (.22). This tune, "The Cardinal Movements", sounds a bit less edgy than their Silkworm work, but is still a very good listen. Their MySpace page has four other tunes in streaming audio, all of them very Silkwormy.

Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) has directed a book trailer for Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which I have not read but is undoubtedly provocative.

And last but certainly not least, WFMU offers up this rarity: the incomparable James Brown, circa the late 1960s, pleading for an end to racial violence, and for the start of more positive initiatives. It's worth a listen, if for no other reason than to hear Soul Brother #1 say the word "antidisestablishmentarianism", but not, unfortunately, to a funky backbeat. If anybody could give soul to that mouthful of a word, it was JB.

(Bottomless Pit link via What To Wearing During an Orange Alert?; Cuarón/Klein link via Bookslut.)

Weekend Multimedia

Time again for another installment of Weekend Multimedia. As before, I've been accumulating a few links that I'm unable to access at the office, and now I'm sharing them here.

Here's the video for the Minutemen's "This Ain't No Picnic", from my latest obsession, Double Nickels On the Dime. Nuff said.

Glenn Mercer's solo debut Wheels In Motion arrived this week, and it's a good one. Suffice it to say that the Feelies are alive and well, in spirit at least. Mercer's MySpace page has two tracks for your listening pleasure, "Wheels In Motion" and "Morning Lights", both of which represent the album quite well. Once I've given the album a few more listens and have a chance to collect my thoughts, I'm sure I'll be posting a glowing review here.

The venerable Mekons have a new album out, Natural, which no less an authority than John Darnielle (of the Mountain Goats) calls "a masterpiece without any weak points." Touch and Go has put up a preview track, "Dickie, Chalkie and Nobby", that has a really nice rootsy feel to it.

Lastly, here's video of George Saunders' wonderful appearance on David Letterman. Notice that Saunders doesn't once mention his book. Imagine that - a talk show guest that doesn't shill his latest project. How refreshing and, as Jeff Parker's warm essay on Saunders suggests, very much typical of the man.

(Minutemen and Saunders links via Coudal.)

"...they are children playing with countries..."

D. Boon, 1984, back when America's overseas meddling efforts were focused primarily on Central America:

Untitled Song for Latin America
The Western hemisphere
and all inside
we know who is murdering the innocent
they are children playing with guns
they are children playing with countries
mining harbors
creating contras
the games they play
the lives they will take
they bank their money in the country
they steal from the innocent
(a colonial trait that is much too old)
the banks, the lives, the profits, the lies
the banks, the profits, the lives, the lies
I would call it genocide
any other word would be a lie

George Bush, October 2000, just a few months before he would have to start keeping his campaign-trail promises:

If we don't have a clear vision of the military, if we don't stop extending our troops all around the world and nation building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road, and I'm going to prevent that.

Cellos in Rock

The Christian Science Monitor posts an article about the increasing acceptance of cellos in "jazz, popular, and avant-garde music."

Friedlander points out that rock musicians are becoming more aware of the cello's range and see it as an alternative to the violin, with its folk fiddling or jazz associations. "Because it's not saddled with bluegrass, 'le jazz hot,' or any of those things the violin has, you can put the cello into an indie-rock situation and it doesn't have baggage," says Friedlander, who has performed with indie-rockers such as the Mountain Goats and John Vanderslice.

I quite like cellos in indie rock, where they often fill a void between bass chords and higher-register guitar notes, giving the music a fuller, richer sound. Coincidentally, during my drive to the train station this morning I was thoroughly enjoying Built To Spill's "I Would Hurt a Fly" (from Perfect From Now On), which features a lovely cello part by guest musician John McMahon, whose efforts here provide even greater depth to Built to Spill's already epic work.

(Via Largehearted Boy.)

The Epitaphs of P.D.Q. Bach

All these epitaphs and elegies of Edgar Lee Masters I've been reading remind me of two considerably more light-hearted epitaphs of P.D.Q. Bach, the fictional, "last and certainly least" child of Johan Sebastian Bach, as imagined by the wonderfully satirical mind of Peter Schickele in The Definitive Biography of P.D.Q. Bach. P.D.Q. was, to put it kindly, a ne'er-do-well, a drunkard, a lecher, a sloth who would rather exploit his family's vast musical legacy by creating a highly dubious - but of course very hilarious - body of "musical" works than earn an honest living. When P.D.Q. finally died of some deplorable causes I can't quite recall, his drunken friends buried him in a makeshift grave, beneath the following words:

Here lies a man with sundry flaws
And num'rous sins upon his head.
We buried him today because
As far as we can tell, he's dead.

The Bach family, despite what (deservedly) little they thought of this most prodigal of sons, soon had him disinterred and relocated to an audacious, marble-pillared mausoleum, memorializing him with this comparatively flowery inscription:

He lies in death, as lie he did in life;
Oblivious to worldly cares and strife.
No base ambitions rile his sodden brain,
And odious ambition waits in vain
For him to rise. Sweet Gabriel, play on!
You'll nothing rouse, except perhaps a yawn.
For P.D.Q. will waken when he will.
And even God must wait that day until.

As much as I like that one, I think I like the guttural simplicity of the first one best.

Weekend Multimedia

Due to system restrictions, I'm not able to view streaming media at the office, so throughout the week I'll usually accumulate various links which I finally check out on Saturday morning at home. Here's this week's highlights:

+ Crain's Chicago Business profiles Jeff Dreyfuss of Chicago's Metropolis Coffee Company, which we visited last year and enjoyed a great deal. Any place that commissions poster art from the great Jay Ryan is already good enough for me (we own a framed copy of that one), but their coffee is excellent and their store is a very comfy hangout.

+ My old hero Bob Mould has licensed one of his best songs, "See a Little Light", to the pension fund TIAA/CREF. Check out the commercial spots here. On his blog, Bob wondered what his fans might think of such a decision, if they'd think he's selling out.

What would you think if one of my songs was used in a TV commercial? Would the product be of concern? Would it change the meaning of the song?

No concerns here, Bob. It's your art, so you're entitled to do whatever you wish with it, and it's a great song whose message generally fits with that of the sponsor. And besides, TIAA is selling retirement security and financial peace of mind - it's not like your song is helping to shill artery-clogging cheeseburgers or anything similarly egregious. Nicely done.

+ Ben Tanzer (yeah, him again) is charmingly interviewed by his five-year-old son, primarily (but not entirely) about his novel Lucky Man. I say "not entirely", because among several other bold queries, the kid has the audacity to ask the burning question that's on everyone's lips: "Why do you wear your hat backwards?" Clearly, the softball-tossing Larry King is thankfully not an influence on the kid.

+ And the multimedia gods at WFMU unearthed these two timeless gems which should bring a smile to any Midwesterner of a certain age: the Heileman's Old Style beer song and waltz. Prosit!

Bob Mould, Author?

Does Bob Mould have a book inside of him, eager to emerge? Maybe, he tantalizingly suggests...

There’s a saying I often think about: Never let your memories be greater than your dreams. Corny, perhaps, but it’s the main reason I have not seriously addressed the book offers. But, yes, at some quiet point in the far future, I will likely dust off the memory boxes and start writing.

Count me in for a pre-order.

Morrissey, Browning and Algren

Check that title line again. An impossible connection, right? Wrong.

Reading Joe Pernice's 33 1/3 series ode to the Smiths' Meat Is Murder prompted me to look up the Smiths entry in the venerable Trouser Press Record Guide, circa 1988. I've delved into that wonderful book so many times over the years that the spine is cracked in multiple places, the corners are lovingly dog-eared and the back cover bulges out from where I once kept numerous rock-related stickers. The book even enjoyed permanent residence atop the side table next to my recliner for several years during my long-past bachelor days. In short, I've been through Trouser Press so many times that there's scarely an entry therein that I haven't read at least once.

Which made it quite pleasantly shocking to look up the Smiths and see this biting reference, as if for the very first time:

The Smiths' ability to turn shameless solipsism into incalculable stardom was their entirely unique accomplishment. With remarkable consistency and integrity, Manchester singer/lyricist (Stephen) Morrissey and company proudly represent the traditional values of selfishness, self-pity and the unbearable anguish of love. His melancholy romantic sensibility makes Elizabeth Barrett Browning sound like Nelson Algren.

Bam! Now that's some great music writing, even though the Algren analogy was probably lost on at least 98% of Trouser Press' readers.

More on Glenn Mercer...

Updating my glowing post about Glenn Mercer, WFMU has a pretty terrific in-studio appearance from Mercer and band. Most of these songs are from his new solo album (though he does perform the Feelies' "Let's Go") and they sound great. To my ears it seems he's gone back to the wonderfully subtle and near-pastoral vibe of The Good Earth and Only Life, forsaking the more urgent and louder tones of the final Feelies and first Wake Ooloo albums. Mercer's album is up at iTunes, and I'll probably be splurging on it soon.

Glenn Mercer steps from the shadows...

The Village Voice has a nice appreciation of the Feelies' Glenn Mercer, who is finally releasing his solo debut, Wheels in Motion, several decades into his career. Although it sounds a bit like it's a solo album in name only--given the fact that Mercer recruited former Feelies bassist Brenda Sauter and several of the band's past drummers for the recording sessions--and more of a Feelies record than anything else. But Mercer is hesitant to call it such, given the continued absence of his former Feelies partner Bill Million:

"I really can't explain it other than the fact that it wouldn't seem right," Mercer says of his geographically departed partner. "If either one of us isn't involved, it wouldn't be the Feelies."

I was glad to see the writer give props to The Good Earth, which is far and away my favorite Feelies album. The critics always seem to prefer their debut, Crazy Rythyms, but The Good Earth is the one that's stuck with me the most for all these years.

Song of the Week: Okkervil River

Now that I'm settling into my new job and getting used to new ways of doing things (both professionally and personally), I'm finally reviving Song of the Week. Next up for your listening pleasure is "The War Criminal Rises and Speaks" by Okkervil River. I've been enjoying this song for several years now, and have been particularly infatuated with it during the past few days. Will Sheff is one of the sharpest songwriters out there, and his earthy and impassioned vocal delivery really brings across his lyrics. The first handful of lines (full lyrics here) are particularly evocative and lovely:

The heart wants to feel, the heart wants to hold.
The heart takes past Subway, past Stop and Shop,
Past Beal’s, and calls it “coming home.”
The heart wants a trail away from “alone,”
So the heart turns a sale into a well-worn milestone
Towards hard-won soft furniture, fought-for fast food,
Defended end table that holds paperbacks and back U.S. News.
The mind turns an itch into a bruise,
And the hands start to twitch when they’re feeling ill-used.

The implication that "alone" is a grim place that it's best to escape always grabs me. The instrumentation on this song -- espeically the piano and drums that accompany Sheff's vocal at the beginning, and the orchestral swell in the middle when the vocals get urgent -- really moves me as well.

Timely, I'm Assuredly Not

After twenty-three years of ignorance, followed by ignorant procrastination, I've decided to finally buy Double Nickels on the Dime -- the classic Minutemen album, of course, to which I will likely add the new 33 1/3 book by Michael T. Fournier.

...Sammy Hagar had scored a big pop hit with "I Can't Drive 55." The Minutemen thought it would be funny to comment on the nature of Hagar's little ditty by letting listeners know that driving fast wasn't terribly defiant. "So to wear red leather and say that you can't drive 55 like that's the big rebellion thing...to us, the big rebellion thing was writing your own fuckin' songs and trying to come up with your own story, your own picture, your own book, whatever. So he can't drive 55, because that was the national speed limit? Okay, we'll drive 55, but we'll make crazy music," says Watt.

If that's not the epitome of punk, I don't know what is.

When the album was first released, back in April 1984, I was a freshman at the University of Illinois who was excessively enamored with George Thorogood, the Who and Dire Straits. (I still appreciate each, to a dramatically lesser degree, but my ardor back then is inexplicable now.) I'll even sheepishly admit to having Billy Joel and Chuck Mangione LPs hidden in my dorm room closet. I knew about the Clash and the Jam from MTV, but my punk indoctrination came so late that I didn't even really discover the Sex Pistols until about 1990. I didn't get into Hüsker Dü until after they'd broken up, and only caught the Replacements on their final tour. And now I'm finally coming around to the Minutemen, twenty-two years after D. Boon's death.

Shameful, indeed.

Song of the Week: Sally Timms

Although I own very little of her music, Sally Timms just might be my favorite female vocalist. Her voice is simple yet supple, offering a pure and clean counterpoint to the rougher singing of her Mekons bandmates Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh. Her vocals on that band's great The Mekons Rock 'n' Roll are quite outstanding -- "Learning to Live on Your Own", "Club Mekon", "I Am Crazy" and "When Darkness Falls" (the latter a duet with Greenhalgh). "Millionaire" (from I (Heart) Mekons) is quite good as well.

But as much as I love her work with the Mekons, my song of choice for her is "Half Past France", from her 1994 solo debut To the Land of Milk and Honey. Her vocals on this song are as lovely as always, and the stately instrumentation is particularly appropriate. Listen, and be entranced.

Song of the Week: The Decemberists

Perhaps it's my mild disappointment with the latest Shins album, Wincing the Night Away (a solid effort, though far short of the pure pop brilliance of Chutes Too Narrow), but I've recently found myself driven into the waiting arms of the Decemberists. Yes, I've heard all the critical raves for their latest, The Crane Wife, but it's their previous album, Picaresque, which bears the song that's playing in my head right now, on endless repeat: "The Engine Driver". Soaring melody, majestic pace, delicate instrumentation, subtle female backing vocals behind Colin Meloy's slightly-nerdy lead and, of course, the lyrics for which Meloy gets endless praise: yeah, it's all there, and all good.

I am a writer, writer of fictions
I am the heart that you call home
And I've written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones

Were it not for the ridding-from-bones part, this might have become my theme song.

Song of the Week: The Drovers

As I've mentioned here on several occasions, the Drovers were Chicago's version of the Pogues, with the biggest difference being that the Pogues came of age during the punk 1970s while the Drovers came of age during the jangle pop 1980s. Or, to put it more specifically, the Pogues cut their teeth on the Sex Pistols while the Drovers did so on R.E.M. Though neither Irish band sounds anything like either of those predecessors, the Drovers drew heavily from the spirit of R.E.M., as the Pogues had with the Pistols, with thoroughly satisfying results.

The Drovers were Chicago club mainstays during the late 80s and early 90s, although, I regret to say, I never saw them perform live. I did, however, once see their offshoot band Wilding (floutist/vocalist Kathleen Keane, fiddler Sean Cleland and drummer Jackie Moran, all of whom left when the band moved from its traditional roots to more of a psychedelic sound) give a lovely performance during a particularly blurry evening at The Hidden Shamrock. (The only time I've ever been thrown out of a bar. Don't ask.) Before those three mainstays departed, the band released one excellent album, World of Monsters, which included the very first Drovers song I ever heard, "Love Won't Be". The song has everything that made the band great in those early days -- the propulsive rythyms, the male/female vocal harmonies, the jaunty fiddle and flute -- and serves as a great introduction to the band.

World of Monsters is long out of print, but the band has generously made the entire album available on its website as MP3s. Do check it out.

Shane MacGowan

In this most Irish of weeks, it's quite nice to see the otherwise staid NYT going slumming to profile the wonderfully incorrigable and unrepentant old boozehound himself, Shane MacGowan.

It might be said that Mr. MacGowan speaks in a Joycean stream of consciousness, but a conversation with him is closer to a pinwheeling ramble with a very well-seasoned regular at the corner pub. He speaks in a flurry of digressions, uttered in a semi-slurred Irish-London accent that is tough to decipher at times.

But, oh my, I haven't seen a picture of him in a while. That photo makes him look like Robert Smith of The Cure. (Not a good thing, to these eyes.) Bejappers!

In other recent Pogues news, Dogmatika posts an intriguing review of Pogue Mahone: Kiss My Arse, the Story of The Pogues, by Carol Clerk.

Gimme Indie Rock

"Book Notes" is a regular feature at Largehearted Boy in which authors share the songs which either inspired their work, or served as a soundtrack to its creation. The feature is always an enjoyable read (it's nice to know other writers are as obsessed with music as I am) but yesterday's entry by John Sellers, author of Perfect from Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life, really grabbed me.

The fact that the book is an "indie rock memoir" is already enough of a grabber, but when he cites his favorite bands -- Pavement, Archers of Loaf, Guided by Voices, Built to Spill (from whom he borrowed the book's title), Mission of Burma, Silkworm -- it's almost as if he's standing in front of my CD collection, reading names off of the spines. On top of that, he too is unsettled about "that ironic 'z'" in the title of Pavement's otherwise laudatory "Gold Soundz", so much so that he decided against naming the book after that song. (Smart move: Perfect From Now On is a much better title.)

Dude after my own heart. I don't read many memoirs, but I may have to grab this one.

Song of the Week: Billy Bragg

During the past six months I've enthusiastically rediscovered the music of Billy Bragg, generally through the Yep Roc reissues of his entire catalog but more specifically through the wonders of iTunes. To me, Bragg is at his best solo, with just him and his electric guitar, banging out fiery, passionate anthems which boost socialism and decry conservative capitalist indifference to the plight of everyday people and their struggles. But during the 1990s, Bragg drifted away from his earlier sound, utilizing a full band while (to my ears) losing much of his passion in the process.

Which makes this newer song from 2002, "Take Down the Union Jack", such a pleasant surprise. Once again it's just Bragg and his guitar, this time delivering an elegy to Britain and its past glories. The lyrics below might appear clunky in print, but when delivered by Bragg's inimitable voice, somehow it all works.

Take Down The Union Jack

Take down the Union Jack, it clashes with the sunset
And put it in the attic with the emperors old clothes
When did it fall apart? Sometime in the 80s
When the Great and the Good gave way to the greedy and the mean
Britain isn’t cool you know, its really not that great
It's not a proper country, it doesn’t even have a patron saint
It's just an economic union that’s passed its sell-by date

Take down the Union Jack, it clashes with the sunset
And ask our Scottish neighbours if independence looks any good
‘Cos they just might understand how to take an abstract notion
Of personal identity and turn it into nationhood
Is this the 19th century that I’m watching on tv?
The dear old Queen of England handing out those MBEs
Member of the British Empire - that doesn’t sound too good to me

Gilbert and George are taking the piss aren’t they?
Gilbert and George are taking the piss.
What could be more British than here’s a picture of my bum?
Gilbert and George are taking the piss

Take down the Union Jack, it clashes with the sunset
And pile all those history books, but don’t throw them away
They just might have some clues about what it really means
To be an Anglo hyphen Saxon in England.co.uk

Song of the Week: Bob Mould

Bob Mould is truly one of the punk rock greats. His groundbreaking band Hüsker Dü, in which he was ably abetted by drummer/singer Grant Hart and bassist Greg Norton, developed quickly beyond its loud-and-fast hardcore roots to incorporate more melody and -- gasp! -- pop hooks, setting the stage for the grunge era of the 1990s. (It's genuinely hard to imagine Nirvana without the precedent of Hüsker Dü.) Trouble is, the band didn't quite make it to that era and enjoy the widespread success it deserved, gasping to a halt in 1987. By all accounts the band's existence was preposterously creative (six full-length LPs in just five years, two of which were double albums) but emotionally draining; relentless touring and endless studio time kept the band in uncomfortably close proximity leading to an abrupt flameout which was perhaps, in retrospect, inevitable.

While perhaps inevitable, Mould took the band's implosion very hard, holing up in a Minnesota barn to pick up the shattered pieces and, not surprisingly, writing songs to make sense of it all. The end result of this period of introspection, Mould's 1989 solo debut Workbook, is a finely crafted but often painful glimpse of the tragic end of a relationship -- in this case, the relationship was with the band, and Hart and Norton, and everything it represented in Mould's life.

Just yesterday, Mould put one of his Workbook songs, "Sinners and Their Repentances", up on his site. I hadn't anticipated ever being able to feature one of Mould's songs here, since I have yet to find any which are available for free public consumption. But thanks to his generosity, which has an Ash Wednesday tie-in, this quietly powerful song is now available to all. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

Song of the Week: Elliott Smith

I was a tardy arrival to the greatness of the late Elliott Smith, having only been familiar with one song of his prior to his sudden passing in 2003. But I caught up rather quickly, acquiring three albums since then, all of which I've loved. "Between the Bars" (from the excellent album either/or) is Smith at his most sadly beautiful, one alcoholic singing to another (Smith had more than his fair share of addictions, alcohol being just one of them). The song's narrative is typically bleak, yet somehow, impossibly, hopeful:

drink up with me now and forget all about the pressure of days
do what i say and i'll make you okay and drive them away
the images stuck in your head
people you've been before that you don't want around anymore
that push and shove and won't bend to your will
i'll keep them still

These two souls are undeniably lost, but still have each other. Quite touching.

Song of the Week: Silkworm

I've long admired Silkworm. Though I haven't bought one of their albums since the mid-90s (the excellent Libertine), I've still been keeping tabs on them over the years -- kind of like an old friend that you once had an intense relationship with for a short time, then drifted apart from, but still check in with from time to time. I've followed the band from a distance since Libertine, through the departure of co-founder Joel R.L. Phelps, then a series of albums on Touch and Go and their move from Seattle to Chicago, and right up to their recent demise after the senslessly tragic death of drummer Michael Dahlquist.

Though the post-Phelps Silkworm was an edgy, electric, tried-and-true (dare I say it?) power trio, on "Let's Kill Saturday Night" they unplug and go acoustic in covering this gem of a tune by the great Robbie Fulks. Every dollar I make is a buck I owe -- now, that's some good lyricking.

Song of the Week: East River Pipe

Though I don't listen to music as obsessively as I used to, I'm still a big fan, and it occurred to me that I need to do a much better job of updating my "Listening" link in the right-hand sidebar. That said, I'm instituting a "Song of the Week" which will hopefully prove faithful to its title and, indeed, be updated once a week.

The first offering is "King of Nothing Never" by East River Pipe, from the ever-wonderful Merge Records. Merge, by the way, has a ton of streaming audio from their impressive roster of artists, which I encourage you to check out.

Edgar Allan Poe, In Song

On what would have been Edgar Allan Poe's 198th birthday, I can't think of a better and more bizarre way to celebrate than listening to this 1969 musical rendition of "The Raven", by some long-forgotten band called Glass Prism. According to the guy who put this gem online, the song actually made it onto the charts in 1974. Remarkable. I get the feeling Poe would have approved.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Top Downloads of 2006

Other than the first song, the rest of these appear in no particular order.

1. Tom Waits, "You Can Never Hold Back Spring"
The relentless optimism of this astounding song is nothing short of inspirational. By far, my favorite song of the year.

2. Joel R.L. Phelps & the Downer Trio, "Who Can I Burn?"
Beware the version of this album (3) on iTunes, which crackles and pops like it was copied from a used vinyl LP. I might have regretted my purchase had Joel Phelps himself not made things right, sending me an autographed copy of the CD, along with his two most recent and similarly out-of-print albums, all gratis. Oh, and the tune is terrific, too.

3. Tommy Stinson, "Someday"
Former Replacements enfant terrible returns from creative oblivion, with the remarkably mature Village Gorilla Head, from 2004.

4. The Replacements, "Color Me Impressed"
I'm a Replacements fan from way back, not so far back as to have witnessed one of their sloppy-drunk bar shows, but far enough to have seen their final show (a feckless effort in Chicago's Grant Park in 1991). This rousing song is one of their finest efforts, nimbly bridging the gap between their hardcore roots and their midcareer iconic glory.

5. Billy Bragg, "Tank Park Salute"
With his big reissue on Yep Roc, there are so many choices this year with Bragg ("Between the Wars", "The Crashing of Ideologies", his completely unexpected cover of "A Change Is Gonna Come") but if I have to choose just one, I'll go with this gentle, poignant track about a young boy losing his father. Heartbreaking.

6. X, "Fourth of July"
I've always loved this one, though I was first familiar with the version by Dave Alvin from his solo debut, Romeo's Escape. (He wrote the song for X, and only later decided to record it himself.) As much as I like Alvin's version, X's is even better, for the harmonic interplay between John Doe and Exene's voices. Alvin's lyrics are particularly vivid -- I can practically see those Mexican kids downstairs, recklessly shooting off fireworks.

7. Chin Up Chin Up, "Virginia Don't Drown"
Excellent Chicago band tones down its math rock impulses with warm keyboards, nimble guitar work and propulsive rythyms, while never forsaking their highly distinctive vocals.

8. The Mekons, "Last Night on Earth"
A song I've been familar with for some time, one which gained enhanced resonance by its key role in one of my favorite novels of the year, Kevin Guilfoile's Cast of Shadows.

9. Greg Graffin, "Don't Be Afraid to Run"
Venerable Bad Religion frontman steps away from the roar to make a traditional folk record. While the reduced decibel level may surprise longtime fans of the band, the song's message of populist protest shouldn't.

10. Sebadoh, "The Freed Pig"
Lou Barlow's 1991 swipe at former Dinosaur Jr. bandmate J Mascis, a perky tune made not at all irrelevant by Dino's inevitable recent reunion. In indie rock, there apparently are no burned bridges.

11. R.E.M., "You Are the Everything"
Moody, aching, as atmospheric as if Daniel Lanois was involved (which he wasn't), this is the best song off of R.E.M.'s most forgettable album, Green.

12. Cat Power, "The Greatest"
Yes, Chan Marshall backed by a syrupy string section. Yes, it works. Somehow.

The Pogues Revived

The Independent has a terrific, loving article on the Pogues, whose reconciliation and reunion with Shane MacGowan has me overjoyed. Not that I particularly care if they ever release any new material -- just knowing that they're out there somewhere, in some whiskey-soaked barroom, joyously pounding out their indelible, timeless music is enough for me. I don't need a new record, as long as descriptions like this can still be written:

The Pogues are delivering a song-and-dance act that links generations, that defies time. A jumble of men in motion, they are doing it with an athleticism that also seems to defy time, at least as far as the accordion player James Fearnley and the guitarist Philip Chevron are concerned, and with a finely tuned sense of dynamics that somehow sounds abandoned amid the grand rush and sweep.

And Shane MacGowan is at the top of his game. He may blunder around the stage, kicking his microphone stand to hell, like the portly uncle of his previous upstart self, but his offhand rasp hits home, gruffly, in the right places, more often than it ever did. He sounds almost exactly like you want him to...

The article includes a nice history of "Fairytale of New York", which for my money is the best holiday song written in the past fifty years. Not to mention the only holiday song which will ever effectively include the line "You're an old slut on junk."

(Via Dogmatika.)

A New Kind of Shuffle

When I settled into my seat on the train this morning, I felt the urge to hear both versions of "Pink Frost" that I own -- the original by The Chills, and the cover by Joel R.L. Phelps & the Downer Trio. I selected the Songs menu on my iPod, and dialed all the way down to the P's, so I could listen to the two songs back-to-back. I meant to switch to something else after the two songs were over, but I got deeply involved in some writing and never made the switch, which means the iPod proceeded to play songs in alphabetical order. Here's what I ended up listening to:

Pink Frost - The Chills
Pink Frost - Joel R.L. Phelps & the Downer Trio
Pink Lemonade - Charlie Chesterman
Pink Turns To Blue - Hüsker Dü
Poor Old Tom - Peter Case
Port Of Charleston - Seam
Pot of Gold - The Bottle Rockets
Potomac - Vehicle Flips
Pretty (Ugly Before) - Elliott Smith
Pretty Persuasion - R.E.M.
Punch And Judy - Elliott Smith
Quicksand - Silkworm
Quit These Hills - Pinetop Seven
Radio Free Europe - R.E.M.
Radio Tower - Victor Krummenacher
Rafael - Seam
Rains Around Here - The dB's
Raise The Dead - Victor Krummenacher
Randy Described Eternity - Built To Spill
Real Cool Time - The Feelies

Give it a try sometime -- it's an interesting alternative to shuffle play.

Story Unfinished, Rocking Resumed

Two election-free items of note:

FoPL Richard Grayson has an unfinished story, "Superstition Freeway", as part of the aptly-named Unfinished Stories series at the blog of writer Kevin O'Cuinn. The series collects uncompleted stories from a wide range of writers, with familiar-to-me names among the contributors including Kevin Sampsell, Myfawny Collins, Elizabeth Ellen, Aaron Burch, Daniel Alarcon, and Claire Zulkey. Do check it out.

Chicago punk legends Naked Raygun briefly reunited to play a club show at the Subterranean, and Chicagoist was there. Funny to see Jeff Pezzati with his hand stamped, as if to prove he's of legal drinking age.

"Your Personal Penguin"

Quite possibly the song of the year: "Your Personal Penguin", sung by Davy Jones of the Monkees and written by Sandra Boynton (a truly wonderful author, and one of my daughter's early favorites) based on her book of the same name.

(Via Chekhov's Mistress.)

Remembering Lounge Ax

At The Beachwood Reporter, Don Jacobson takes the moment of the sad passing of New York's venerable CBGB to reflect on the earlier (and no less sad) passing of Chicago's great Lounge Ax. Jacobson's absolutely right in saying that while Lounge Ax was a priceless cultural institution, it's not the kind of culture that Mayor Daley and City Hall want to have around. Better to have an yet another overpriced martini bar in that space than one of the epicenters of the city's music community.

I saw quite a few great shows at Lounge Ax back in the day, which were memorable as much for the personal connections that an intimate club like Lounge Ax makes possible as for the music itself. Cases in point:

+ Peter Case playing solo acoustic, vainly trying to be heard over the mindless chatter of the socialites at the back of the bar.

+ The wonderful Scruffy the Cat undeservedly relegated to being an opening act (I left after their set, having absolutely no interest in the headliner). I bought their final single, "Love Song #9" (actually a split single with Young Fresh Fellows) from Charlie Chesterman himself at the bar after their set, when I bought him a beer and listened to his record label tales of woe. (The band broke up shortly thereafter.)

+ A very young Uncle Tupelo, who preceeded their set by drinking heavily in the bar right in the midst of the waiting audience.

+ A slightly older Uncle Tupelo, playing a jaw-droppingly loud cover of Creedence's "Effigy." My friend Mark had never heard the song (which had just been released on the No Alternative compilation), and after it ended and the ear-splitting echoes of distortion slowly dissipated, he turned to me and simply mouthed the word "Wow."

+ The marvelously raucous Evan Johns and the H-Bombs ("Saving Grace" is still one of my all-time favorite songs), with Johns autographing a cheesy Miller Genuine Draft promo poster of the band, which I still own. He misheard me when I asked that he add "Long live Texas", instead writing "It's a long way to Texas". This disappointed me a little until I got home and realized it was one of his own lyrics, from "My Baby, She Left Me ('Cause I Wouldn't Lay My Guitar Down)", which was infinitely better than the generic phrease I suggested.

Damn, I still miss Lounge Ax. What a great place.

Indie Record Stores, Alive and Kicking

With the recent official demise of Tower Records, it could easily be assumed that record stores are doomed. But Newcity Chicago offers a quite impressive rebuttal to that belief, publishing their Indie Record Store Guide, profiling over forty stores throughout the city. Plenty of familiar names there from my city days, most notably Reckless Records, Record Emporium and Second Hand Tunes. I really miss those old places.

Newcity also reports that another of my old haunts, Record Breakers in Hoffman Estates, is relocating to the city, and adding a live music venue next door. I bought a ton of stuff at the old place during the mid 1990s, and it's truly a great store. The Northwest suburbs' loss is the South Side's gain.

With Paul Westerberg selling his soul to WalMart, my discovering a great trove of old Twin/Tone videos, the Tournament of Tunes finally drawing to a close, and now the Newcity record store coverage, it's definitely been a week of music for me.

Ted Leo Virtual Tchotchkes

In honor of Ted Leo's hard-fought victory in the Tournament of Tunes, I'm passing along a few electronic odds and ends. The wonderful photo above was taken at the 25th anniversary party for Touch and Go Records (photo courtesy of Pitchfork).

Next, here's the video (Windows Media) for "Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?" (Ted's loving tribute to ska pioneers the Specials) from the terrific album Hearts of Oak. Listen closely, and you'll hear him name-check Terry Hall, Jerry Dammers and Lynval Golding.

Lastly, here's an animated video (Flash) of Ted covering "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, created by Scott Bateman. Charming indeed.

Tournament of Tunes Final:Ted Leo vs. Camper Van Beethoven

The final round of the Tournament of Tunes has finally arrived. Without further ado...

Ted Leo - Loyal to My Sorrowful Country [mp3]
vs.
Camper Van Beethoven - Sweethearts [RealAudio]

These are two excellent artists who have enough in common that I could easily see them sharing a stage. Not together, that is—their musical approaches are quite different. Out of respect and deference, I’d imagine i