Hey Hey, They're the Granddaddies of Country Rock

With all due respect to Gram Parsons and Bob Dylan, the real shitkickin’ granddaddy of country rock was a Hollywood star, and a Monkee. It happened a full year before Parsons introduced Merle Haggard and the Louvin Brothers to the hippies with the International Submarine Band’s Safe At Home and The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo. And it happened a full two years before Dylan emerged as the country squire on Nashville Skyline. Mike Nesmith was the granddaddy’s name, and his music is now all but forgotten in the ongoing hipster backlash against the Prefab Four. It shouldn’t be.

I am no hipster, but I am as guilty of the backlash as anyone. I was a young adolescent in 1966 and 1967 and 1968, the time when The Monkees were omnipresent on television, on collectible cards, and on lunchboxes, and outselling The Beatles at the music stores. But even then I hated the goofy slapstick of the television show, found the hits (particularly the Davy Jones ersatz Broadway tunes) cloying and saccharinely sweet, and proudly disdained the efforts of four band members who couldn’t even play their instruments. I was in a band, and I couldn’t really play my instrument either, but I wasn’t getting rich by pretending I could. I thought The Monkees were everything that was wrong with commercial music, and I was smug in my own thirteen-year-old version of aesthetic superiority and anti-capitalist sentiment. Up against the wall, motherfucker. Now I need to go study for my algebra test.

To state the obvious, I didn’t buy any steeeeenking Monkees albums. So I missed out on all the album tracks that, four decades down the line, convince me that I was wrong. The recently released deluxe reissues of two 1967 albums – Headquarters and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. – have been nothing short of revelatory for me. The third and fourth albums from the band, respectively, they show The Monkees asserting creative control over their careers. Having recently sacked their Svengali-like promoter and manager Don Kirshner, the band set out, by God, to play their own instruments, write their own songs, and make music on their own terms. And they did. And although Jones still has his cloying ballads, and half the tracks still sound disposable, one shining fact emerges: Mike Nesmith was the real shitkickin’ deal. Long before the hipsters claimed the hallowed ground as their own, Mike Nesmith was writing great country rock tunes.

I knew several of these songs – “What Am I Doing Hangin’ ‘Round?,” “Nine Times Blue,” “You Just May Be the One” – from Nesmith’s later stint as leader of the First National Band. There’s no question about the country-rock imprimatur of that band. But the FNB albums dated from the early 1970s, well after the seminal contributions of Parsons and Dylan. What I didn’t know is that Nesmith had recorded equally twangy versions of the songs with The Monkees, and that those songs predate the generally acknowledged pioneers of the genre. Listening now, forty years after the fact, it’s amazing how well they hold up. And it’s amazing how little critical acclaim they’ve received. So I’ll do my small part to set the record straight. I’m still not a big fan of The Monkees, and Davy Jones still strikes me as the template for cuddly, utterly innocuous pinups from David Cassady to Donny Osmond to Justin Timberlake . But give credit where it’s due. Mike Nesmith singlehandedly changed rock ‘n roll music. And he did it while he was a member of The Monkees. Who could have imagined such a thing? Certainly not my smug, thirteen-year-old hipster self.

Paste -- Not For Sale

I don't normally post press releases, but this one is worth passing along, I think.

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Today, Paste and OurStage launched our joint donation campaign aimed at helping The Not For Sale Campaign to end slavery around the world. For each sign-up to OurStage driven by this campaign, OurStage will donate $2 directly to NFS. The campaign will be tracked in real time on Paste Magazine’s web site – www.pastemagazine.com, showing abolitionist supporters the difference they are making with each registration.

Throughout the year, I’ve been increasingly exposed to the horrible global injustice of modern day slavery. It’s invisible to most people, but the reality is that 27 million people live in slavery around the world—from teens sold as sex slaves in Southeast Asia to children abducted in Northern Uganda and forced into unspeakable acts as soldiers for the Lord’s Resistance Army. About 80% are women and children. Even in this country, more than 200,000 people are held against their will, repeatedly raped or made to work without pay, trapped by threats against themselves and their families.

We’re thankful to be able to add our voice to the growing chorus of people fighting to end modern-day slavery through our partnership with OurStage. Our hope is to raise at least $25,000 in donations by the end of the year. The goal is to engage music and film fans to support the Not For Sale efforts by educating them on the enormity of this global criminal activity and then giving them an easy way to help solve the problem. By simply signing up with OurStage (a free online community, where you can discover new music and judge the best artists to be awarded monthly prizes), you can help end worldwide slavery.

I’ve gotten to know David Batstone who heads up Not For Sale, and his organization is working on the ground here and throughout the world, supporting both the efforts of those actively rescuing slaves and those doing the important restorative work to help them make a life for themselves once they’ve been freed.

OurStage has my deepest gratitude and respect for joining us in this cause. Sign up for OurStage at http://www.ourstage.com/go/endslavery and tell others about this important issue. You’ll see a counter on our homepage over the next several months, showing how much you’ve helped raise.
The Facts
The commerce in human beings today rivals drug trafficking and the illegal arms trade for the top criminal activity on the planet. The slave trade sits at number three on the list but is closing the gap.
Nearly 200,000 people live enslaved at this moment in the United States, and an additional 17,500 new victims are trafficked across our borders each year.
The European Union (EU), has been unable to stop the flood of 120,000 women and children trafficked each year into its member states.
UN surveys from 2004 found 700,000 children forced into domestic labor in Indonesia alone, with staggering numbers as well in Brazil (559,000), Pakistan (264,000), Haiti (250,000), and Kenya (200,000).
Of those individuals extracted out of impoverished countries and trafficked across international borders, 80 percent are female and 50 percent are children.
We can, and have to, speak against injustice. Now it is easier than ever to end slavery. Everyone is invited. Welcome to the movement. Become an abolitionist today!

—Josh Jackson
To support the NFS efforts by registering on OurStage, please visit: www.ourstage.com/go/endslavery
To donate directly to NFS, visit: http://notforsalecampaign.org/Donate.aspx

Justice

Everybody loves to see justice
Done on somebody else
-- Bruce Cockburn, “Justice”

Start with someone who has difficulty parsing the English language, add some bits of willful misrepresentation, mix liberally with inflammatory statements, and top with a hazy love of all things Flower Power that can’t recognize the ambivalent nature of the Summer of Love. That’s a recipe for slander, and I got a big dose of it yesterday.

Okay, I’m starting off all wrong. I wish this didn’t bother me. I wish I could just shrug it off as a difference of opinion. But it doesn’t seem to be in my personality to be able to do that. Yesterday the new issue of Paste Magazine (with the fantastically bearded Iron and Wine on the cover) arrived. As usual, there are about a hundred pages in this issue. But within minutes, all I could focus on was the two inch by three inch text square in the Letters to the Editor section that vilified me for my recent column on The Summer of Love. In that remarkably small text box I was informed that “Andy Whitman” is a pseudonym for ultra-conservative G. Gordon Liddy, that I am ignorant, that I don’t understand irony, that Paste needs to find an editor to ensure that tripe like mine isn’t published, and that, thanks to my ill-informed tripe, the letter writer will be cancelling his/her subscription to the magazine. So a few hundred thousand people got to read that, if they cared to do so, and it was enough to keep me up for about half the night.

Look, criticism comes with the territory, and I understand that. I just wish the criticism was based on an accurate understanding of what was said. It's more than a little frustrating to be vilified for views I don't hold, and taken to task based on a woeful misreading of what I wrote. But beyond that, I spent a fair amount of time last night, tossing and turning, simply thinking through and praying through why I react the way I do.

It’s the injustice of it all that gets to me. Okay, I don’t like criticism. But I really don’t like criticism when it’s unfounded. If I screw up, then call me on it. I may not like it, but I’ll probably eventually come around to your point of view. But when you totally misrepresent who I am, and when you just don’t have a clue about what I’m saying, then it pains me, to the point of sleeplessness, to contemplate what is being communicated. I start concocting elaborate revenge fantasies involving grammar lessons, a flaming pyre of Paste Magazines at the feet of the heretic, Jimi Hendrix’s highly combustible guitar, and Allen Ginsberg thumping on a tambourine and chanting “Ohhhmmmm” as the spectacle rages around him. Burn, baby, burn. That was part of the dazzling, golden sixties, too.

And it’s all wrong, and I know it. I don’t want to respond this way. So I spent a fair amount of time praying for grace, for compassion, for forebearance, for the opportunity to impart some basic grammar lessons and principles of literary interpretation to … You see how quickly it goes awry. It’s a battle. I find myself angry. And I find myself praying all the time. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. But it’s so much fun being called “ignorant” in a national forum. It’s so much fun to read that in print at Barnes and Noble. I know. Most people won’t care. Most people I know won’t care. I understand that. But I think I need to pray some more.

Bruce Cockburn had it right. Justice is what we want to see inflicted on others, and the last thing we want to see for ourselves. So I pray for something that goes completely against my natural personality: grace. It's not deserved. That's the point.

Anders Osborne -- Coming Down

First, the bad news: Anders Osborne’s latest album is highly derivative, and he does little more than channel early ‘70s Van Morrison. Now, the good news: Anders Osborne’s latest album is highly derivative, and he does little more than channel early ‘70s Van Morrison. Since the new Van can’t sing like the old Van, there’s something to be said for imitation, particularly when you can scat off into the mystic like this guy. There’s also something totally delightful about the Swedish ex-pat Osborne, long a resident of New Orleans, paying homage to the iconoclastic Belfast legend. Call it international chutzpah. Fortunately, he has the voice to pull it off, and, surprisingly, the songs to match.

The Big Easy musical influences that dominated Osborne’s earlier albums are toned down here, although a sousaphone still peeks through occasionally to make its presence known. What’s left are the songs, stripped down for the most part to a lean acoustic guitar, drums, and upright bass. Osborne’s seen some hard times personally, as has his adopted New Orleans, and he alternates between rueful and occasionally harrowing reminiscences of addiction, laments for his drowned city, and (to balance out the gloom) stirring odes to love, love, love, love, crazy love. “Down on Dumaine” is his version of “Cypress Avenue” – a soulful look back on a neighborhood now gone. “Oh Katrina” is the tour de force here, the hurricane personified as the age-old heartbreaker and homewrecker. It’s a song that can stand with similar statements from Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint, Shawn Mullins, and The Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Otherwise, Osborne sings of his own wild nights and the Tupelo Honey who keeps him sane. He’s cooked up an altogether tasty gumbo of soulful blues, hard-won wisdom, and that impossibly great voice, magically conjured across the space of 35 years. “Between the hurricanes and the heartaches/My old heart is doing fine” he sings near the end of the album. As further evidence, he’s created one of the best albums of the year.

Centurions

Some thoughts on Jeff’s sermon from yesterday …

“When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, "Surely he was the Son of God!"” – Matthew 27:54

We don’t expect the most despicable people on the planet to experience spiritual transformation. It’s not supposed to work that way. We like it when sweet little old ladies like Mother Teresa encounter God early in their lives and then live out many decades of love and service. God bless the little old ladies. We don’t like it so much when, say, puppy murderer Michael Vick claims to see the light, and expresses a desire to use his prison time to get right with God. Despicable people should just stay despicable. Otherwise we have to start forgiving them, and we all know how messy that can be.

The particular centurion in question was a leader in the Roman army, which happened to be the occupying power in Judea at the time of Christ. The Romans, in spite of what you may have read in your high school or college history classes, were not always nice, enlightened people. They routinely executed anyone who was perceived to be a threat to their rule, and had, in fact, just done the same with Jesus, for the very same reasons. Before they did that, however, they tortured Jesus. They beat him, spat on him, mocked him.

We who have seen the tapes from Abu Ghraib have seen these diabolical dynamics played out. They are images that do not fade quickly or easily. There is far more than physical abuse at work here, although there is certainly that. There is also emotional degradation, humiliation, dehumanization. It is a scene that has been repeated throughout history, from the time of Christ to the Spanish Inquisition to the Nazi concentration camps, from Stalin’s gulag to the killing fields of Cambodia to Abu Ghraib. It is appalling and deeply disturbing what human beings will do to other human beings. It is who we are when we are at our worst. And the centurion in question was in on that kind of action, the kind that is designed to suck the soul right out of somone who has the inalienable right to his or her soul, his or her stamp of humanity. It is treating human beings as less than human, and becoming a monster in the process.

So what does it mean when that kind of monster, that most despicable of human beings, has an encounter with God? How is it even possible that such a monster should encounter God? What about the notion, found in Romans 1, that God gives people over to the desires of their hearts, to be the people they want to be, and that monsters who want to be monsters are granted their wish? Can they be turned into handsome princes again, just like that? Should they be?

Jeff didn’t say it, but I will. I live with a fundamental schizophrenia: I don’t want to have mercy on some people, but I’m really glad that God has mercy on me. There is something in me that rebels at the notion of the centurion, or of serial killer/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, receiving the mercy of God. It’s not fair.

Which, of course, it is not. But it is gracious, and I’m very thankful for grace. Apparently it takes an earthquake to rouse some people from their lethargy, to make them see the truth. It did for the centurion. We don’t know what happened to him. He’s never mentioned in the Scriptures again. He disappears from history, having undergone some sort of spiritual epiphany, but I like to envision the story continuing. I like to envision him approaching Peter, John, any of the surviving apostles after the resurrection of Christ. I can picture the revulsion on their faces, the utter distaste with which they must view the man. I can see him admitting his guilt, and what he now knows to be true about the Son of God. I can feel the unbearable tension in that room. And I can see Peter – it would have to be Peter – slowly reaching out to touch him, to embrace him. Peter would understand what it’s like to betray the humanity of another. He would understand real guilt, and he would understand real forgiveness. And that’s the scene I try to call to mind when I don’t understand, when my foolish heart proclaims its innocence, and I need to be reminded of the monster within.

Evangelicals and the Arts

Here is a recent article from Touchstone Magazine that I’ve seen rewritten under various titles for most of my Christian life. It starts out like this:

The modern Christians who are important writers are all from liturgical churches: Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox. The closest thing Evangelicalism has to a name that could rank with these is probably Walter Wangerin, Jr., who is not really a mainstream Evangelical but a Lutheran—again, from a liturgical tradition.

Try to think of a conservative Baptist, a Free or Wesleyan Methodist or a Nazarene, a conservative Presbyterian, a Plymouth Brother, a member of the Evangelical Free Church or the Christian and Missionary Alliance, a Pentecostal, or a member of an independent Bible church who belongs in that company. (Some have mentioned writers who used to be in those churches—but the phrase “used to” in the observation is telling.)

The liturgical churches foster a lot of schlock and kitsch of their own, but they also nurture great writers and great writing. So far, we Evangelicals have not. In fact, we often positively discourage “literary” writing as being of questionable spiritual value.

This is something of a mantra in Christian academic circles, and I typically encounter this lament at least once every six months: where are the evangelicals, and why does their art suck? The kindly professors probably wouldn’t state it quite so baldly, being nice, proper academics, but the evangelicals would comprehend the question better because they don’t understand big words, so we’ll let the crudeness slide.

I've read these sentiments, and others like them, so frequently that they’ve become cliches. There's only one problem: they’re not true. They bear little relationship to reality.

Look, I love Flannery O'Connor as much as anyone. Kate will attest that I lobbied long and hard to name our first-born daughter Flannery in honor of Ms. O’Connor. She and the other High Church literary cherubim and seraphim – Graham Greene, Walker Percy, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien – have enriched my life tremendously. But Percy, the most contemporary of those writers, has been dead for fifteen years, and O'Connor, Greene, Lewis and Tolkien were writing fifty or more years ago. And you know what? In the intervening half century, evangelicals have actually produced some worthwhile work. Two of the most celebrated Christian novelists working today, Marilynne Robinson and Leif Enger, are writing from a decidedly evangelical perspective. Enger's Peace Like a River was named the 2002 Book of the Year in the L.A. Times, and was lauded in almost every review. Robinson's latest novel Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. This does not suck. And when you add in contemporaries such as Frederick Buechner, Annie Dillard, John Updike, and Anne Lamott, who really don't fit into either the High Church or the Evangelical categories, it seems fairly clear to me that non-liturgical, non-High Church Christians have as much of an impact on literature as their High Church contemporaries, and maybe more. And the odds are even more lopsided in the popular music world, where it is evangelicals like U2 and Sufjan Stevens who have arguably released some of the best and most popular albums created from a Christian worldview. In other words, the argument in Touchstone was valid thirty years ago. It doesn’t apply now, and it hasn't been true for a long time.

I will confess that part of it is that I don’t understand the categories. Why is it, for instance, that “liturgical” and “evangelical” are presented as mutually exclusive terms in the Touchstone article? In my church we incorporate elements of the liturgy and fixed-hour prayer into both our public and private worship, but theologically we would align ourselves along evangelical lines.

I also don’t know what to make of the many stereotypes found in the article – that evangelical art is often little more than religious propaganda, for instance. Sure, there is no lack of horrendous schlock out there. Just walk into the Christian Family Bookstore of your choice and peruse the puppy and kitty posters with Bible verses, or the rack of Precious Moments figurines. But the world the author describes is simply not the world I encounter. My church is heavily skewed, nay, infested, with artists – painters, poets, photographers, musicians, writers, standup comics, graphic designers. I would guess that artists make up 40 to 50 percent of the adult population, and many of these folks make their full-time living through art. They are not making “Christian” art or religious propaganda; they’re creating art, and they’re out there in the marketplace competing with everybody else. What I don’t know is how typical or atypical my church is. I don’t have any way to gauge how this compares with the evangelical world as a whole. So do me a favor. I’d love to hear from those of you in other evangelical churches, and find out how the arts are viewed in your church. Are they valued in and of themselves? Or are they viewed as “witnessing” tools? And for those of us in my church, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you think the variables are within our church that seem to lead to a high view of the arts. Thanks.

Patti Scialfa -- Play It As It Lays

It's not her fault that Patti Scialfa must go through life known as Mrs. Bruce Springsteen. Patti had her own (admittedly lowkey) musical career before she met The Boss, and she's sporadically released solo albums throughout her marriage. And they've been fine, albeit a little too reliant at times on Broooooce iconography and E-Street accompaniment to put them across. But Patti's new album Play It As It Lays, out today, is her first real musical triumph. She gets it exactly right, and she's very much her own woman.

Sure, Bruce is here, and contributes on guitar and harmonica, and fellow E-Streeter Nils Lofgren is around as well, but this music bears little to no resemblance to the music her famous husband has made. It's starker, more blues-based, more reliant on the slide guitar, full of gospel melismas that accompany decidedly secular tales of love and lust, betrayal and deception and doubt. It's the kind of album that could only be made by a 40-something wife and mother who is more interested in the hard work of loving when it's tough than in celebrity and notoriety. It's a fine album; sexy, soulful, literate, and honest. It's Patti doing Dusty in Memphis, and the E/Beale Street mashup works just fine.

I'm Not There

Cate Blanchett (yes, Cate Blanchett) as Bob Dylan in Todd Hayne's upcoming film "I'm Not There."

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Oxygen
Ohio State Football
Food
Water
Shelter
....
Self-Actualization

T-minus 24 hours until the start of another wacky season in Buckeye football land, and the team's first two games are officially in limbo (does that still exist, or did the Catholic Church relabel it the Big Ten Network?). Oh, they'll be played all right. It's just that if you're not one of the lucky 110,000 sitting inside the Horseshoe, you won't be able to see them. That's because the B10N still has not reached an agreement with any central Ohio cable providers. Last year all 12 Ohio State regular season games were televised by ABC/ESPN. They were free ("free" being a relative term meaning that they were part of the basic cable package). Most were shown in high definition. This year we have the privilege of paying extra for a premium cable service that currently no one can receive, to watch games that currently cannot be broadcast in high definition even if some cable company miraculously steps in and works out an eleventh-hour deal. Somebody explain to me again just why this is a good thing ...

What if they invented a new network and nobody came? One can dream.

Michael Vick Chew Toy

Somebody came up with a brilliant marketing idea.

Coming in the Clouds (Inspired by The Fifth Dimension)

For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. -- 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17

The Singles of the Summer of Love

Before Labor Day arrives and we bid a fond farewell to the Official 40th Anniversary Celebration of the Summer of Love(TM), let's revisit the top singles of that groovy summer, shall we? Here they are:

Van Morrison - "Brown Eyed Girl"
The Hollies - "Carrie-Anne"
James Brown - "Cold Sweat"
Soul Survivors - "Expressway to Your Heart"
Wilson Pickett - "Funky Broadway"
The Beach Boys - "Heroes and Villains"
Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood - "Jackson"
The Box Tops - "The Letter"
The Music Explosion - "Little Bit o' Soul"
Tommy James & The Shondells - "Mirage"
Bobbie Gentry - "Ode to Billie Joe"
The Monkees - "Pleasant Valley Sunday"
The Supremes - "Reflections"
The Animals - "San Franciscan Nights"
Scott McKenzie - "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)"
The Turtles - "She'd Rather Be With Me"
The Tremeloes - "Silence Is Golden"
Janis Ian - "Society's Child"
Spanky & Our Gang - "Sunday Will Never Be the Same"
Lulu - "To Sir With Love"
The Mamas & The Papas - "Twelve Thirty"
The Fifth Dimension - "Up, Up and Away"
Procol Harum - "A Whiter Shade of Pale"
The Association - "Windy"
Jackie Wilson - "(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher"

Note the relative lack of hippie wankery. Sure, Scott McKenzie is there, and blissfully instructs us to wear flowers in our hair. But "Scott McKenzie" is to "Hippie" as "Velveeta" is to "Cheese." The Monkees, the Prefab Four, offer the radical suggestion that we should all fire up our suburban grills for a nice barbecue. Lulu greets us with a sappy ballad to her favorite teacher, and The Fifth Dimension, already one step away from a Vegas lounge act at the onset of their careers, exhort us to get high by riding in a hot air balloon. To be sure, there are some great songs and performances there. Van is Van, and nobody's ever sung "sha-la-la-la-la" any better. Bobbie Gentry scored her one hit, and then disappeared, but what a hit it was. Procol Harum proved that it was possible to marry Bach to trippy imagery, and Brian Wilson was heading quickly toward both sonic brilliance and a mental breakdown. And James Brown, Wilson Pickett, and Jackie Wilson all delivered classic soul performances. But I'm struck by just how ordinary and pedestrian so much of this music was, and is. The revolution was happening, and somebody forgot to notify AM radio.

By the fall of '67 they'd figured it out, and we'd soon be hearing groundbreaking music from the likes of The Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and Santana. But outside of San Francisco, the Summer of Love was remarkably quiet, and remarkably ordinary.

Uncle Tupelo's Kids

It’s been almost fifteen years since the Great Uncle Tupelo Schism rocked the music world. Okay, perhaps I exaggerate. Outside of Belleville, Illinois and the minds and hearts of a few thousand dedicated fans, probably not many people even noticed. But I did, and I mourned for a couple years before the first Wilco and Son Volt albums appeared. The chief protagonists, Jeff Tweedy and Jay Farrar, have certainly moved on to bigger and better things in the intervening years – Tweedy with Wilco, and Farrar with Son Volt. But, truth be told, as much as I like them now, I liked them better when they were alternating songs on classic albums like No Depression and Anodyne.

There are apparently others who remember as well. Here are two bands who have chosen sides in the schism, but who capture that early Uncle Tupelo energy nonetheless. And when you put the two CDs together and play them in shuffle mode, you’d swear that it was 1993.

Southeast Engine – A Wheel Within a Wheel

Representing the Wilco side of the schism we have Athens, Ohio’s Southeast Engine, and lead singer/songwriter Adam Remnant, who does a more than passable Tweedy impersonation. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Adam Remnant is a pseudonym, because there are more biblical allusions here than in the entire U2 catalogue, starting with the opening rocker “Taking the Fall” and continuing right on through the final track “Let It Be So,” which sounds like The Partridge Family (complete with ba-ba-ba-dah chorus) discovering the Book of Revelation. There’s an openness and vulnerability that makes it all more than palatable, though, and when Adam sings the asshole-returning-to-Jesus confessional ballad “God, Let Me Back In,” his voice cracking like Tweedy’s in all the right places, there is a world of hurt in those straightforward lines. This is unironic, poetic Jesus Americana. Tweedy pulled it off with “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down.” Southeast Engine pulls it off for forty minutes here. (Out October 16th on Misra Records)

Macon Greyson – 20th Century Accidents

Representing the Son Volt side of the schism we have Dallas’s Macon Greyson, and lead singer/songwriter Buddy Huffman, who has Jay Farrar’s craggy, soulful tenor down to a sadsack science. There are times when it’s impossible to tell them apart. Like the early Son Volt albums, Macon Greyson’s songs alternate between blistering roots rockers and country-inflected ballads. The ballads are just fine, and showcase Huffman’s social conscience and better-than-average lyrical gifts. But this band really shines on the rockers, where they take the no-frills ethos of the best bar bands and kick it right into the back alley. The bluesy Stones swagger of “Black Light” may offer the best Keith Richards guitar lick since “Brown Sugar,” and the sturdy power chords of the title track and “Minnesota Weather Map” will have the air guitarists pumping their fists. It’s straightforward rock ‘n roll for the millionth time, and, as is the case with all such miracles, it sounds utterly fresh and vital. (Out October 9th on Fat Caddy Records)

People Take Warning!

In 1930, commercial radio was still a novelty, and television and CNN were as fanciful as the notion of travel to Alpha Centauri. In the rural southern United States, still largely bereft of electrical power, news traveled slowly, and was usually conveyed not by professional journalists, but by itinerant musicians who set up shop on the steps of the general store, or in the jukejoint on the outskirts of town.

People Take Warning!, a 3-CD box set about to be released by Tompkins Square Records, collects 70 topical songs recorded between 1927 and 1938. These are songs you might have once heard on the general store steps or in the jukejoint, and they chronicle disasters great and small – floods and tornadoes, hurricanes and fires, prison riots and sinking ships, crashing airplanes and collapsing coal mines and serial killers; a whole panoply of tragedy and devastation. Not surprisingly given the early recording technology, the sound is abysmal. The performances range from mediocre to superb. And the songs themselves are utterly harrowing. The deaths per song ratio has to be higher here than any music not related to Auschwitz or Hiroshima.

There are well-known, even legendary performers here – Son House and Charlie Patton, Charlie Poole and Furry Lewis, delightfully mixed together during a time when genres like “blues” and “country” were not so rigidly defined. Even more impressive are the one-hit and no-hit wonders who appear in this collection, perhaps once famous on the local circuit, now lost to the cultural memory – Richard “Rabbit” Brown, an old medicine show performer who frequented the steamboats and barroms of New Orleans, traveling evangelist Elder Curry, who saw the Memphis flu epidemic of 1930 as the judgment of God, the Dykes Magic City Trio, whose murder ballad “Poor Ellen Smith” was outlawed by the local North Carolina sherriff because it caused a riot whenever it was sung. There’s also Kansas Joe’s and Memphis Minnie’s 1929 recording of“When the Levee Breaks,” a song you have may seen credited to the old itinerant bluesmen Page/Plant.

It’s ancient music, to be sure, and the pious sermonizing and saccharrine sentimentality surely mark it from another, distant era. But it’s surprising how contemporary some of these songs still sound. “The Muder of the Lawson Family” could be an outtake from Springsteen’s Nebraska. And the grizzled Bob Dylan is still recording songs like this, and “Nettie Moore” from Modern Times could be lifted directly from this collection. It’s a fascinating glimpse into our musical past, and an ongoing reminder of how little some things have changed. I watch scenes on CNN of miners trapped in Utah, and these songs form the soundtrack in my mind.

Walk Score

Here's a handy, fun, and utterly worthless tool that calculates the Walk Score for your particular residence. Go ahead and try it. I did and found that my particular abode registers a 28 out of 100, which is considered "Poor."

But if you were to actually look at the map that comprises all those walkability components near my home, you would see a bunch of green and blue -- green for parks, and blue for water. You know why? Because I live within a half mile of two metro parks, and within a couple hundred yards of a lake.

Here's the deal: I live in the perfect neighborhood for walking, and I walk all the time. I walk through the woods. I walk along the shore of a lovely lake. And when I take a walk, those are the kinds of places I like to walk. But because I can't easily walk to a Starbucks, and because the nearest Tae Kwan Do establishment is miles away, my neighborhood is dinged for not being very walkable. Screw it. What urban moron thought that these categories would be meaningful to anyone who doesn't wear a robe and a headband all day?

Hold Steady, My Man

Yes, they are coming back to Columbus. October 27th at the Newport Music Hall. Anybody want to join me and my white-haired Emmylou Harris lookalike for a night of gutter poet/cowgirl beauty queen fun?

New All Music Guide Reviews

The Mendoza Line -- 30 Year Low/Final Reflections of the Legendary Malcontent
Golden Dogs -- Big Eye Little Eye

Go, Kid, Go

Start with a plaintive nasal whine, a la Dylan, and end in an agonized howl, a la that raccoon you caught in the trap last summer. Pummel your guitar in the middle. Go, kid, go. Oh, how I love this album.

God is a middle aged woman
With planets for earrings
And international date lines
At the corners of her eyes
And she’s thinkin’ ‘bout remarriage
To a guy she recently met
And hasn’t even asked out on a date
Okay, to be perfectly honest
He’s never even spoken to her
He barely even knows she exists
But hey, God is really shy
She doesn’t like confrontation
And she’s not so young anymore

But oh God, won’t you just say hello?
Oh God, you can take it real slow

It’s been hard since Jeremy left her
And sometimes it seems so pointless
Like she’s unlovable
But I love her very much
I love the way she looks
And I just want her to be happy
I wish I could talk some sense
Into her troubled head
Full of beautiful grey hairs
But I am only human
But maybe that’s just it
Or maybe that’s just what she needs

Oh God, things are gonna be fine
Oh God, don’t lose your head over some stupid guy
Oh so beautiful on the patio at night
Oh so wonderful
How did I not see it before?
Oh God
Oh God
-- Ezra Furman, “God is a Middle Aged Woman”

Harry Potter: Dreadful and Vulgar?

Some of you are ready to cast Cruciatus curses my way even now. So let me explain.

I'm a Harry Potter fan. I find myself caring deeply about him and his Hogwarts friends and teachers. I want him to win the hand of Ginny Weasley, pass his O.W.L.s and, in general, restore order to the universe. But Harry has his critics, both literary and moral. Some reviewers have castigated author J.K. Rowling for her awkward prose. And the moral guardians of truth? Where does one begin? How about with Spokesperson for the Moral Masses James Dobson.

Last week he reiterated his criticism of the books:

We have spoken out strongly against all of the Harry Potter products. Magical characters — witches, wizards, ghosts, goblins, werewolves, poltergeists and so on — fill the Harry Potter stories, and given the trend toward witchcraft and New Age ideology in the larger culture, it's difficult to ignore the effects such stories (albeit imaginary) might have on young, impressionable minds.

One hopes that someone will eventually introduce Dobson to the writings of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. This week he bemoans the loss of sacrificial heroes in our culture. If the irony were any thicker, you'd have to cut it with a Lumos spell.

It's unfortunate when the clueless have vast influence, but I honestly don't spend much time worrying about James Dobson and his woeful misconceptions. Of far more importance to me is the prevailing view in some circles that the Harry Potter books are lowbrow fluff, literature in only the most tenuous sense. To gain a better appreciation of those who hold this view, I refer you to this excellent article, written by Paul Spears.

To probably no one's great surprise, I am somewhat sympathetic to this view. I've read all seven Harry Potter books. And every five pages or so I found myself wincing at the awkward sentence structures, the lazy writing, the adjectives that weren't quite right. And my Inner Snob, which all too quickly becomes my Outer Snob, was offended. Spears describes this process very well:

Many who consider themselves academic are embarrassed to admit the guilty pleasure of popular literature, and in our public capacity believe it is our duty to point out that Harry Potter is not Dante’s Inferno. For some reason critics think that if people quit reading popular novels and spent more time immersed in the work of Homer or Spenser the world would be a more ethical and beautiful place.

I will note that this view applies not only to literature, but also to -- oh, let's just pick an artform at random -- music. The prevailing view among music critics is that popular equates to crap (to use the popular vulgar term), and that, in spite of occasional aberrations about once per decade (U2, Bruce Springsteen), there is an inverse relationship between number of albums sold and quality. According to this theory, the greatest music is currently being made by some kids in their bedrooms in Portland, Oregon, who are known only to four of their friends and their grandmothers. Since this music will be difficult to find, you might want to check out new albums from people named Ezra Furman and Joe Henry instead. Hypothetically.

But getting back to Harry, let me note again that I read all seven books. And I deeply enjoyed all seven books. Awkward writing be damned, there was something there that compelled me to read more than 4,000 pages of the story of the boy wizard. And sure enough, Paul Spears nails what that is, too:

The world of Harry Potter is grounded in transcendent truth. In J.K. Rowling’s magical world there is no doubt about the fact that there is good and evil. It may be difficult to determine who is good or evil (Snape), but whether or not good exists is never in question. Heroic acts are lauded by the good people, and pencil-pushing bureaucrats who are legalist for the sake of legalism are seen as not truly understanding the fight between good and evil. You learn that good is worth fighting for even when it puts you in mortal danger. It is because Rowling draws from the transcendent that we so resonate with her fiction.

It is good that Harry Potter is dreadful and vulgar. It appeals to those of humanity who, according to Chesterton, “have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared.”

To put it another way, you can't beat a ripping good story. But it's interesting to note what makes it so good -- those transcendent themes that transform us even if we are not cognitively aware of them. One of them, which Spears doesn't touch on directly, is laying down one's life for others. That reminds me of something, some big religious deal I'm thinking. Nah, that couldn't be right, because this is a demonic wizard we're talking about.

Garfield's Houses

Former President James Garfield’s impressive home (called Lawnfield, as opposed to my own home, called TractHome) is about a mile down the street from my sister-in-law’s place in Mentor, Ohio. Because there isn’t a lot to do in Mentor, Ohio, particularly when it’s raining or snowing, as it often is, Lawnfield is a favorite destination during our visits. As befitting an ex-president, it’s a showy, ostentatious Victorian castle with some friendly midwest trimmings, including a wide front verandah that stretches the length of the very long house. The ol’ homestead fell into disrepair for a few years, but since then it’s been lovingly restored to its former glory, fitted out with period furniture and Victorian frills and patriotic bunting. Now packs of blue-haired women roam the grounds, admiring the gardens, the carriage house, and the servant’s quarters.

Twenty-five hundred miles away, right where the canyons of L.A. give way to the start of the San Gabriel valley, the singer/songwriter and musical archaeologist Joe Henry lives in the home built for James Garfield’s widow Lucretia. Joe claims that he can hear Lucretia’s ghost wandering around at night, and that she seems to be soothed by anyone playing the piano. Who am I to doubt him? Joe’s been exhuming old skeletons (both in and out of the closet) and mysterious scraps of poetry and long-suppressed nightmares for about twenty years now, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he’s turned up a ghost or two along the way. I just think it’s fairly amazing that one of them lived at Lawnfield.

Joe Henry has a new album called Civilians coming out in a few weeks. It’s another in an ongoing series of poetric dreamscapes from the coolest lounge in the universe, the one where the piano player reads Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Chandler, where the patrons all drink their bourbon neat and play Tom Waits on the jukebox in between sets. It’s lounge noir, and it’s desperate, and desperately tender, tinged with an aching sadness and the flicker of hope, with the increasing awareness that the tiny dramas enacted here are not tiny at all, and that they echo in eternity.

Here’s the way Joe expresses it in the liner notes:

I have noticed with surprise - and only in retrospect - how often God is mentioned throughout this 12-song cycle, and He must be surprised as well. I recognize in His many appearances, though, not the god of my Methodist raising, who sat judging tennis balls “in” or “out” from high on a perch, but one among us, who stretches like the net itself, wholly visible and there but to frame the attempt. (To me, this is the God of Shakespeare, Wilde, Moliere, and Buster Keaton, and could easily be played by Gene Hackman, if he wasn’t otherwise so occupied.)

It probably won’t win any points for theological precision, but it does just fine in the human interest department, the one that matters when you’re writing songs about conflicted human beings instead of hymns and praise choruses. And nobody writes songs about conflicted human beings better than Joe Henry. A few albums back he wrote one about Richard Pryor that pretty much set the standard for how to portray sinners and saints who inhabit the same body, and he does it all over again here with a song about Charlie Parker, surely nobody’s idea of a saint, but a marvellously gifted musician who was touched by the divine.

This is the state of the union as delivered by a 46-year-old man, subject to the ravages of time, trying and failing at times to be a good husband and a good father, increasingly aware of his shortcomings and the hope that lies outside of those shortcomings:

We’re taught to love the worst of us
And mercy more than life, but trust
That mercy’s just a warning shot across the bow
I live for yours and you can’t fail me now
I live for your mercy
You can’t fail me now

It’s a proclamation and a prayer, a statement of fact and a fervent plea. It’s also a damn good love song, the kind between a man and a woman, and not between a man and his maker. Joe Henry does that kind of thing pretty well, too.

But sure enough, there are metaphyscial and biblical echoes throughout these songs, including one that employs Passover imagery to allay the ravages of time and death:

If you fear the angels above while you sleep
Then I’ll be the blood you paint on your door
Your dream is a worry that nothing will keep
But time is a story and there will be more

These are sad songs, even desperate songs. But always there is a glimmer of hope, of something like the belief that love might actually make a difference, and that there is still time to make a new start. And they were recorded in that house haunted by ghosts.

James Garfield never really got started. He was felled by an assassin’s bullet a mere seven months after he took office. Unlike the mythologized Lincolns and Kennedys, he stuck around for a while, and all the melodrama of martrydom melted away in the tedium of a long recovery that never quite happened. He lingered in a coma for a few weeks, then seemed to make a miraculous comeback. He regained consciousness, then lucidity, and was bundled up and shipped to the New Jersey seashore in the hope that the invigorating ocean air would speed the healing process. The bullet didn’t kill him, at least not directly. An infection did, ten weeks after the murderous fact. He died of sepsis, the old wound festering and leaking poison throughout his body.

Joe Henry sings on his new album:

We build this up and we knock this down
We call our little mob a town
We nail a sign above the door
God bless our little civil war

He could be singing about The Shiites and the Sunnis, or the internecine warfare between husband and wife. But I like to think that he’s singing about James and Lucretia and, by extension, all of us who are caught between the safe, neatly manicured world we think we can control and the shock of sudden tragedy, walking around with the shrapnel of an ancient wound lodged in our souls. Say hello to Lucretia for me, Joe, and play her a sweet and sorrowful tune on the piano.

Paste #35

Paste #35 (September 2007) is out now. Kanye West, his humble self, is on the cover, and there are long feature articles on Kanye, K.T. Tunstall, and Rilo Kiley, plus the usual album, film, book, and video game reviews, and a 20+ song CD sampler. I have album reviews of Pentangle and Raul Midon and a meditation/essay on the wonders of a folk/protest singer named Peter Case.

One of the criticisms that Paste Magazine receives on a fairly routine basis is that albums are ranked too highly, that there are too many four-star reviews (although, to their credit, Paste rarely awards a five-star review because, quite frankly, there just aren't that many five-star albums). So I thought about that criticism again when I opened the album reviews section and saw album after album rated as four stars.

Is the criticism justified? Maybe, but only if you think it's unlikely that fifteen or so really good albums could be released every month. Personally, I have no problems with all those stars so liberally festooned over the pages. Paste, like most magazines, is presenting a skewed sample. The magazine covers what it wants to cover, and most people want to write about things they like. Paste receives roughly eight hundred new album releases every month. Is it really that hard to believe that fifteen of them are really good?

For what it's worth, I did my little part to balance out the proceedings by assigning 2.5 stars to Raul Midon's album. But then I blew it by assigning 4.5 stars to Pentangle, and by raving about Peter Case. Sorry. I like them, and I want to tell people about them. The tagline of the magazine is "Signs of life in music, film, books, and culture," and those signs of life are everywhere.

A New D****?

There are few curses more dire than to be tagged the New Dylan. Anybody remember Steve Forbert these days? So I won’t say it. I’ll keep it vague and say that Ezra Furman’s nasal vocals, harmonica work, and wildly poetic imagery might remind you of somebody.

Ezra Furman is a twenty-year-old kid from Chicago, via Tufts University in Boston. He’s got a band, The Harpoons, and he’s titled his debut album Banging Down the Doors. It’s been out for a couple days now, and you ought to buy it. Today. He has got, as they say, one hell of a Voice. Not much in the way of the vocal kind, mind you. That voice is completely untamed, and often doesn’t bother with trivial little things like pitch. The kind that makes you jolt out of your seat as you hear one startling image and one pithy aphorism after another. The kind that, you know, that other guy came out of the gate with, the freewheelin’ wild kind that cuts through the bullshit and makes you see the whole crazy, beautiful world in new ways:

She is pressing foot to petal, she is zooming straight away
She is swimming in the jukebox of the screaming, driving day
She’s about the age of Mary when she had her wonderboy
She’s an alcohol enthusiast whose dad is unemployed

That’s the way one of Ezra’s songs starts out before careening off into reflections on faith, doubt, Starbucks coffee, premature death, and the peculiar malaise of the times in which we live, all in a neat three minutes and ten seconds. Then he follows that up with a love song to God, who in Ezra’s fervid theological imagination is a middle-aged woman who wears planets for earrings and has international date lines at the corners of her eyes.

These are acoustic songs, for the most part, although they’re a million miles removed from laid-back folky territory. There’s a manic, propulsive energy at work here, and these songs hurtle by at breakneck speed. That other guy once said that he wrote songs so quickly because he couldn’t envision the world lasting much longer, and you get the same sort of feeling listening to these songs. Like Alec Ounsworth of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel, Ezra Furman sings like his skull is ready to explode. He’s got the world’s biggest migraine, and he spits out his words like machine gun fire, and at times he abandons language altogether and simply howls like a feral wolf. It’s frightening, and it’s brilliant.

I moaned a few weeks ago that I had yet to hear a 5-star album this year. I’ve heard one now. Midway through these extraordinary proceedings Ezra yelps,”This is only our first record, I want you to love me!" Don’t sweat it, ye precocious harpooner. Mission accomplished. These are songs that sink deep, and they draw blood every time.

Pulling Up the Drawbridge

There's an interesting discussion underway at the Arts and Faith forum. It's the age-old conundrum of how much we, as Christians, should allow the surrounding culture to influence our lives. Typically, this discussion breaks down along fairly predictable lines. The conservatives/fundies accuse everyone of being worldly and having lost their salt and light, the rock 'n roller moviegoers accuse the convervatives/fundies of being narrow-minded, judgmental, and out of touch, and the non-Christians look on in disgust and thank the Higher Power As They Understand Him/Her/It that they are not Christians. I'm thankful to report that, for the most part, the current discussion has not degenerated along the predictable lines.

There is a tension here that will never entirely disappear. Nor do I think it should disappear. It is evidence of the struggle that we face as Christians; trying to follow Christ, and being acutely aware of our own proclivity to give in to temptation and to sin.

I do think that the whole focus on evil being “out there” is fundamentally misguided, though. The problem isn't movies, or rock 'n roll. You can retreat from all media influence (or limit that influence solely to the “wholesome” Christian cultural ghetto), hole up in the fortress, pull up the drawbridge, fill the moat with pirahnas, and still find evil, because we cannot escape from ourselves. The problem is “in here,” not “out there,” and until we start to address that we’re focused on the wrong things.

But I think it would be disingenuous to claim that the culture doesn’t influence us, sometimes in negative ways. I love rock ‘n roll, and I write about it for my living (or at least part of my living). I obviously find value in that, and yes, I find value as a Christian. But I’ve also struggled with some addiction issues in my life, including some years when I was a Christian. How did that happen? Because of my own inherent weakness and proclivity to sin, because of genetic disposition, because of peer pressure, because of the lure of idolotry and the promise of an instantaneous buzz instead of the hard work of spiritual transformation. Take your pick. Probably all of the above. But also because I listened to Grace Slick telling me to “feed my head,” and because I watched a bunch of crazy hippies in Michael Wadleigh’s documentary of the original Woodstock Music Festival and thought to myself, “hey, I think I’d like to do that the rest of my life.”

Jefferson Airplane didn’t make me do those drugs, nor did Michael Wadleigh. But it would be silly for me to deny that they influenced me. And so, to this day, I am careful about what I allow myself to be exposed to in music and in film. I can handle a lot of things, and shrug it all off in the name of art and believe (rightly, I think) that art is made by broken people and experienced by broken people, and that it is still possible to find great beauty and insight in the midst of the carnage. But as one of those broken people, I can’t watch movies that feature drug use, nor can I listen to music that advocates drug use[1]. I simply can’t go there because I’ve gone there in the past and almost destroyed my life.

It is not true that Anything Goes, although I think we should be very careful about proscribing what goes and does not go in a group setting, including the church. We need to leave enough room for the Holy Spirit to work in individual lives, and trust that individuals are sensitive enough to know what they can experience as worthwhile and praiseworthy, and cannot experience because it would be detrimental to their souls, if not their marriages, and their very lives.

Do I think it's okay for churches to show films, or to sponsor rock 'n roll shows? Sure I do. At the same time, I want to leave room for people to opt out of the proceedings without fear of judgment. The problem is not “out there.” The problem is me. But sometimes what is out there can undo whatever spiritual transformation has already taken place. And nothing is worth that, not even rock 'n roll.

[1] Don't you hate it when the footnote is longer than the original post? Me too, but you're gonna have to deal with it. I think it's important to note here that tone and context is everything, and just because a film/song contains references to drug use, that does not necessarily mean that said film/song is advocating drug use.

Take, for example, virtually every song recorded by my favorite rock 'n roll band, The Hold Steady. There are drug references galore. But you'd have to twist the meaning of those songs quite dramatically to believe that songwriter Craig Finn is advocating drug use. And because I will go to great lengths to work in Hold Steady lyrics into any form of writing I engage in, including recipes and directions to a friend's house, here's an example of what I mean:

I was not involved at the northtown mall
as a matter of fact i didnt even know that's where it happened

i was france ave when they came out dancing
i was lyndale south. i was kicking it with cousins
we were talking about going clubbing
instead we just started drinking

i've been straight since the cinco de mayo
before that i was blotto
i was blacked out. i was cracked out
i was caved in.you should have seen all these portals
that i've powered up in.

we started recreational
it ended kinda medical
it came on hot and soft and then
it tightened up its tentacles

i wasnt there
i was blind high
i was scared. i was lake and columbus
i was cutting off all my hair
i was unfurling a flag of defiance
aimed at my guidance guy

so this is it
this is the end of the session
i ain't gonna be taking any more questions
i think my attorney's gonna second that notion

it started recreational
it ended kinda medical
it came on hot and soft and then
it tightened up its tentacles

the band played screaming for vengance
and we agreed, this world is mostly manacled
it started ice cream social nice
it ended up all white and ecumenical

there are guys
with wild eyes when they ask to get you high
there are girls
that will come to you with comfort in the night
that's right

we started recreational
it ended up all medical
it came on hot and soft and then
it tightened up its tentacles
the band played sabbath bloody sabbath
you thought it was stoney and adorable
it started in the vestibule
it ended in the hospital

there are guys
with the wild eyes when they ask to get you high
there are girls
that will come to you with comfort in the night
there are nights
where it all comes on a little bit too bright
there's a cross
and in the center there is a hot soft light
-- The Hold Steady, "Hot Soft Light"

The Mendoza Line -- Thirty Year Low/Final Remarks of the Legendary Malcontent

I've been spending more time with The Mendoza Line's Thirty Year Low/Final Reflections of the Legendary Malcontent, the band's upcoming 2-CD swan song. The more I listen, the more I like what I hear. The only bad news (other than the obvious marital crash and burn that is well documented here) is Timothy Bracy's Dylan impression that occasionally borders on parody. But he's a fine writer, and the manic guitars cover the multitude of drawn out, nasal vowels.

And Shannon McCardle? Wow. If Bracy tends to cushion his sorrows in poetic ways, McCardle goes straight for the jugular, snarking about the picture of the kitty on her rival's sweater, and offering sweet little vignettes like this:

Come on over honey
Grab your pens and get your shit
She's drawin' blueprints, layin' marble,
Built a shrine around your dick

Hell hath no fury. McCardle's songs are white hot, furious, and absolutely great. I hate divorce. I don't wish it on anyone. At the same time, I'm thankful for the superb art that sometimes emerges from the crucible of pain. This is bitterness and recrimination set to a backbeat, and in its voyeuristic way it's brilliant. My sympathies to Timothy and Shannon. My thanks for creating such a wonderful album.

I Hate Blogs

Not all the time. But many days.

Here's how it works:

1) You post some lovingly crafted tome of cultural analysis, or some agonized personal reflections. Nobody responds.

2) You read your friends' blogs, who post about breast feeding, or the baby's hard turd. Four hundred forty seven people respond, and share their own loving baby poop stories.

3) You get depressed.

Today I hate blogs.

My kids used to poop in their pants. No kidding. Not for a long time, though.

Being Bob

Nobody but Bob Dylan can be Bob Dylan, but you can’t blame a songwriting guy for trying. In order for this to work, you have to simultaneously sound profound and utterly inscrutable. The response that you’re aiming for here is a sage nod of the head, even as each audience member secretly thinks, “umm, just what the hell was that about, anyway?” So here’s Adam Duritz of The Counting Crows, pulling it off better than most.

I woke in mid-afternoon cause that's when it all hurts the most
I dream I never know anyone at the party and I'm always the host
If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts
You can never escape, you can only move south down the coast

I am an idiot walking a tightrope of fortune and fame
I am an acrobat swinging trapezes through circles of flame
If you've never stared off in the distance, then your life is a shame
and though I'll never forget your face, sometimes i can't remember my name

Hey Mrs. Potter don't cry
Hey Mrs. Potter I know why but
Hey Mrs. Potter won't you talk to me

Well, there's a piece of Maria in every song that I sing
And the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings
And there is always one last light to turn out and one last bell to ring
And the last one out of the circus has to lock up everything

Or the elephants will get out and forget to remember what you said
And the ghosts of the tilt-a-whirl will linger inside your head
And the ferris wheel junkies will spin there forever instead
When I see you a blanket of stars covers me in my bed

Hey Mrs. Potter don't go
Hey Mrs. Potter I don't know but
Hey Mrs. Potter won't you talk to me

All the blue light reflections that color my mind when I sleep
And the lovesick rejections that accompany the company I keep
All the razor perceptions that cut just a little too deep
Hey I can bleed as well as anyone, but I need someone to help me sleep

So I throw my hand into the air and it swims in the beams
It's just a brief interruption of the swirling dust sparkle jet stream
Well, I know I don't know you and you're probably not what you seem
But I'd sure like to find out So why don't you climb down off that movie screen

Hey Mrs. Potter don't turn
Hey Mrs. Potter I burn for you
Hey Mrs. Potter won't you talk to me

When the last king of Hollywood shatters his glass on the floor
and orders another, well, I wonder what he did that for
That's when I know that I have to get out cause I have been there before
So I gave up my seat at the bar and I head for the door

We drove out to the desert just to lie down beneath this bowl of stars
We stand up in the palace like it's the last of the great pioneer town bars
We shout out these songs against the clang of electric guitars
You can see a million miles tonight But you can't get very far
Oh, you can see a million miles tonight But you can't get very far

Hey Mrs. Potter I won't touch
Hey Mrs. Potter it's not much but
Hey Mrs. Potter won't you talk to me
-- Counting Crows, “Mrs. Potter”

People Take Warning

I realize that there are only about a thousand people on the planet who would be excited by such things, but I am one of them. Somebody should write a song about bridges in Minneapolis.

-----------------------------------------------

People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs 1913-1938
Landmark 3CD Box Set Coming September 25th, 2007

"In the late 1920's and early 1930's, the Depression gripped the Nation. It was a time when songs were tools for living. A whole community would turn out to mourn the loss of a member and to sow their songs like seeds. This collection is a wild garden grown from those seeds."
- Tom Waits, from the Introduction

Songs of death, destruction and disaster, recorded by black and white performers from the dawn of American roots recording are here, assembled together for the first time. Whether they document world-shattering events like the sinking of the Titanic or memorialize long forgotten local murders or catastrophes, these 70 recordings - over 30 never before reissued - are audio messages in a bottle reflecting a lost world where age old ballads rubbed up against songs inspired by the day's headlines.Featuring beautifully remastered recordings by the some of the cornerstones of American vernacular recording such as Charlie Patton, Ernest Stoneman, Furry Lewis, Charlie Poole and Uncle Dave Macon, these songs tell of life and death struggles forever immortalized on these rare and compelling 78 rpms.

Produced and annotated by Grammy winning team of Christopher King and Henry "Hank" Sapoznik with an introduction by Tom Waits, the accompanying 48- page three-CD anthology designed by Grammy award winning Susan Archie brims with many eye- popping historic images never before reproduced.

People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs 1913-1938 TSQ 1875
Release Date: September 25th, 2007

The Appetite for Difficulty

I was struck by New York Times film critic A.O. Scott’s appreciation of the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, who died earlier this week. Like fellow searcher/director Michelangelo Antonioni, who died the same day, Bergman asked the tough questions and probed the great mysteries in his films. They were not easy going, these films. They were dark, obtuse, freighted with symbolism that asked the viewer to actually work at its meaning, and that implied that it might take more than one viewing, and a fair amount of thinking and discussion, to adequately explore that meaning.

Scott wrote, in part:

There was, among certain filmgoers in the 1960s, an appetite for difficulty, a conviction that symbolic obscurity and psychological alienation were authentic responses to the state of the world. More than that, the idea that a difficult work had special value — that being challenged was a distinct form of pleasure — enjoyed a prestige, at the time, that is almost unimaginable today. We would rather be teased than troubled, and the measure of artistic sophistication is cleverness rather than seriousness.

Given all that, it may be hard for someone who wasn’t there — who never knew a film culture in which “La Notte” didn’t already exist — to quite appreciate the heroic status conferred on Mr. Antonioni and Mr. Bergman 40 years ago. I don’t believe that the art of filmmaking has necessarily declined since then (I’d quit my job if I did), but it seems clear the cultural climate that made it possible to hail filmmakers as supreme artists has vanished for good. All that’s left are the films.

It was and is an utterly radical proposition: that enlightenment and entertainment were not mutually exclusive concepts; that one could come blinking into the sunlight from a darkened theater and emerge not numbed, not mollified, but as a better human being.

A comparable movement was underway at the same time in the world of popular music. In the same years that Bergman and Antonioni were at the peak of their considerable powers, The Beatles were redefining what was possible in pop music with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Marvin Gaye was probing the incongruities of Black Power and life in the ghetto, and Bob Dylan was spinning out couplets like these:

Inside the museums infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation will be like after a while

Now we get:

I’m hot coz I’m fly
You ain’t coz you not

Yeah, okay, I’ve stacked the deck, and I’m picking examples that suit my argument. And yes, there are exceptions. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t view the sixties as some sort of mythic golden age in the history of music. I was there, and I had my ear to the radio, and I’m here to tell you that there was as much musical swill then as there is now. But what was different is that complex, innovative music and culturally engaging lyrics could still find a mass audience – even when that audience had to listen to the songs three or four times before even conjecturing on their meaning.

The wonder is not that music such as Sgt. Pepper’s … or Marvin’s What’s Goin’ On? or Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde could be made. People are still making comparably challenging music today. The wonder is that it could achieve mass acceptance, that people – a large number of people, at that – actually listened to these albums, really listened to them, sat around and pondered lyric sheets and debated rhyming couplets, and that people like Bob Dylan could have #1 hits on the Billboard charts. The miracle is that Bob Dylan was utterly inscrutable, and yet he was a certifiable rock star who sold millions of records.

We could debate endlessly about why we, as a culture, no longer have an appetite for difficulty. We could toss around terms like “MTV” and “video games” and “American Idol” and engage in hand wringing over the cultural lobotomization of America. And that’s a fun game. I’ll be sure to play it next week. But for right now I’d simply like to salute what was, and what may never be again. Bergman and Antonioni are gone, and so are Lennon and Harrison and Marvin Gaye. They made me a better human being. They made a lot of people better human beings. And they miraculously entertained us in the process.

Unfiltered Camels and Jack Daniels Roundup

It’s been a mediocre year for the usual Americana suspects. Lucinda Williams and Son Volt delivered disappointing efforts, and Emmylou, Neko, Gillian, Buddy Miller and John Prine have been missing in action. Except for the ever-delightful Patty Griffin, the latest from The Avett Brothers, Devon Sproule’s wondrous Keep the Silver Shined and Ryan Adams’ surprisingly consistent Easy Tiger, nothing has really wowed me. Until the last few weeks, that is. Steve Earle’s latest, Washington Square Serenade, due out in a couple months, is a fine return to form. And these three albums, all made by relative unknowns, make me remember why the genre will always be one of my favorites. They are gems, one and all, but they’re not polished gems. These are songs honed around kitchen tables filled with overflowing ashtrays and covered by stains from whiskey glasses. And these voices are rough, ragged, and just about perfect.

Chris Knight – The Trailer Tapes

Chris Knight’s four alt-country/rock albums are very fine, but nothing prepared me for the power of the utterly unadorned Trailer Tapes. Originally recorded as demos in his single-wide Kentucky house trailer in 1997, Knight brings a ravaged voice, a fine eye for detail, a compassionate heart, and a sardonic wit to the proceedings:

You say you're from college
But you don't seem too bright
You just brung a switchblade
To a pistol fight

These are tales of small town losers and drifters, little-girl ballerinas who turn into strippers to make ends meet, women who murder their abusive husbands, lost good ol’ boys adrift in big-city canyons. It’s just Chris’s acoustic guitar, his brutal songs, and that plaintive rasp, which is a dead ringer for Steve Earle. But it’s no crime to do a Steve Earle impersonation, particularly when you’ve been doing Steve Earle better than Steve Earle over the past four or five years.

Diana Jones – My Remembrance of You

Diana Jones, like Gillian Welch and Iris Dement, has the uncanny ability to write original songs that sound like they originated a couple centuries ago in some backwoods West Virginia holler. There’s an untamed blue yodel to her voice that will be offputting to some, but she can sit and sing for a spell on my front porch any time. And the eleven original songs here are gorgeous; plainspoken and straightforward, but probing the depths of complex relationships and an unnameable angst:

When you see me sliding fast
When you see it come over me
You don’t need to swear and break down the door
You just need to use the key
And lay me down

Mother Maybelle never sang about that stuff.

There’s no question that the image makers have been at work here. Diana’s got the thrift store Dust Bowl dress, and the hair pulled back in the prim bun. But some things can’t be faked. And in a world where “country” masquerades as aerobic instructors in Stetson hats, it’s great to hear the real deal.

Tandy – To a Friend/Did You Think I Was Gone?

Tandy is Brooklyn singer/songwriter Mike Ferrio and an ever-shifting lineup of bandmates. Named not after the Radio Shack folks, but after a character in Sherwood Anderson’s bucolic Winesburg, Ohio, the band’s been around for ten years, released a few albums, and probably sold a few hundred of them (and by a few hundred I mean a few hundred; none were printed in batches larger than 500). The two albums here, one old (2004) and one new, should go a long way to erase that anonymity.

Aided and abetted by Ana Egge and the great Malcolm Holcomb, Ferrio sings like John Prine, plays looselimbed, ragged country rock, and writes some of the damndest lyrics I’ve ever heard. That Sherwood Anderson reference is surely deliberate, because Ferrio perfectly captures the stifling boredom and ennui of smalltown life in tiny, telling details:

The Dream Superette sells soda, beer and cigarettes
They got bread and ice and plastic cars and almost everything
They got AC and TV and CDs in there
And action man toy handcuff sets
I’m waitin’ in the parking lot for the fuckin’ phone to ring
And a bus goes by on 29 headin’ for the interstate
Leaves a black cloud that hangs there in the air
If I hurry up I’ll catch me one ‘fore it’s too late
By tomorrow I could be anywhere

I’ve been in that store. You probably have, too. There are over two hours of music here, and not a minute is wasted.

If I Were You

I've been listening to Chris Knight's The Trailer Tapes pretty much non-stop all day. Knight's a great, gravel-voiced folkie with a twang, Bob Dylan with a Stetson, but unlike Dylan he's considerably more plainspoken, if no less intense. He's got four good alt-country/rock albums that are well worth your time, but these trailer tapes (yep, recorded in the living room of his single-wide in Slaughter, Kentucky) are something else again, raw and plaintive and stripped down to the bare essentials, including the lyrics. It's just Chris, his acoustic guitar, and his piercing words. Here are some of them:

If I were you
I would gladly loan to me
A dollar or two
So I could eat yeah and maybe
Get just one good night of sleep
But I'm not
And I'm stranded like a castaway in this town
And you seem so unwilling to help a fellow
When he's down

If I were you
Thats what I'd do

If I were you
I wouldnt be out on these streets
The whole night through
Yeah I'd have a job
And a pretty wife that
I could come home to
But I don't
And I have twenty cents left to my name
And you're the only one left here
That I have to blame

If I were you
Thats what I'd do

Sir it's not my way
To take from you
The things I haven't earned
Wish I could go back and heed
The lessons I have learned
But I can't
So you gladly put your money
In this sack
Yes sir this thing is loaded
And I have the hammer back

If I were you
That's what I'd do
If I were you
That's what I'd do
-- Chris Knight, "If I Were You"

Good News for Led Zep Fans

If I were granted two wishes, my first would be that I could be just like Jesus. The second would be that I could look and sing like Robert Plant circa 1971, which would allow me to wail like a banshee, grow my hair long and curly (enough of this pathetic furze), and walk around with the top three buttons of my shirt unbuttoned and not incur startled looks and chortles.

For others like me, there is good news.

------------------------------------------------------
MOTHERSHIP

Comprehensive Two-CD Led Zeppelin Collection FeaturesTwenty-Four Remastered Studio Tracks; The Very Best of Led Zeppelin Available In Multiple Configurations

Remixed And Remastered Deluxe Reissue of The Song Remains The Same
Soundtrack Includes Previously Unreleased Tracks

The Song Remains The Same Landmark Concert DVD In Limited Edition,HD-DVD And Blu-Ray Disc From Warner Home Video

Available November 13 and November 20

(Los Angeles, July 27, 2007) -- After nearly forty years, Led Zeppelincontinues to inspire generations with their groundbreaking blues-infused,guitar-driven rock 'n' roll. Arguably the biggest rock band in the worldthroughout their 12-year reign, they remain one of the most influential andinnovative groups in music history. With over 200 million albums soldworldwide, their catalog is one of the most enduring bodies of musicalcomposition to come out of the 20th century.

Available November 13, Atlantic Records/Rhino Entertainment will honor theRock & Rock Hall of Famers with the release of Mothership, a 24-track,two-CD comprehensive collection that spans their illustrious career. Alleight of the band's classic studio albums are represented here, with thetracks being personally selected by Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John PaulJones. Mothership includes landmark songs such as "Whole Lotta Love,""Immigrant Song," "Kashmir," "Rock And Roll," "Dazed And Confused," and"Stairway To Heaven." The set will also include new liner notes by famedrock writer David Fricke.

Available at all physical retail outlets and www.ledzeppelin.com,Mothership collectible packages will be available in multipleconfigurations:

+ Standard Package -- 2-CD set ($19.98 SRP)
+ Deluxe Edition -- 2-CD/ 1-DVD featuring the premiere-version (90minutes) of live performance footage culled from the Led Zeppelin DVD($24.98 SRP)
+ Collector's Edition -- 2-CD/1-DVD ultra-deluxe, collectible limitededition ($TBA)
+ Vinyl Edition -- 4 LPs, high-end, audiophile quality vinyl withcollectible memorabilia ($74.98 SRP)

Originally released in 1976, The Song Remains The Same soundtrack album ofthe concert film features songs from the band's three-night stint atMadison Square Garden in July 1973. On November 20, The Song Remains TheSame soundtrack gets the deluxe reissue treatment, with the band membersoverseeing the remixing and remastering of the original release. The newversion of the soundtrack includes six songs that were not on the originalrelease -- "Black Dog," "Over The Hills And Far Away," "Misty MountainHop," "Since I've Been Loving You," "The Ocean," and "Heartbreaker," plusnew liner notes by Academy Award-winning director Cameron Crowe (AlmostFamous).

Slated for a simultaneous release, Warner Home Video debuts brand-new DVDeditions of The Song Remains The Same, now for the first time with all 14songs from the original concert. The DVD features newly remixed andremastered sound, 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound, and boasts more than 40minutes of added bonus material*, including never-before-released performance footage of "Over The Hills And Far Away" and "Celebration Day";plus performances of "Misty Mountain Hop" and "The Ocean"; a rare 1976 BBC interview with Robert Plant and Peter Grant; vintage TV footage from theDrake Hotel robbery during the New York concert stand; and a Cameron Croweradio show.

The discs will be available as follows:

+ Deluxe Edition DVD -- ($19.97 SRP*)
+ Deluxe Edition HD DVD and Blu-ray -- ($28.99 SRP each*)
+ Limited Collector's Edition -- 2-disc set includes collectible vintage T-shirt with original album artwork design, soundtrack CD, lobby cards,reproductions of original premiere invites, tour schedule, and more ($TBA*)

"We have revisited The Song Remains The Same," says Jimmy Page, "and can now offer the complete set as played at Madison Square Garden. This differs substantially from the original soundtrack released in 1976, and highlights the technical prowess of Kevin Shirley, who worked with us on How The West Was Won. When it comes to The Song Remains The Same, the expansion of the DVD and soundtrack are as good as it gets on the Led Zeppelin wish list."
For additional information regarding Mothership or The Song Remains The Same soundtrack, please contact Lellie Capwell in Rhino Entertainment'sMedia Relations Department at 818-238-6246 or Lellie.Capwell@rhino.com.

For additional information regarding Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains TheSame DVD, please contact Ronnee Sass in Warner Home Video's Media RelationsDepartment at 818-977-6439 or Karen Penhale or Suzie Cornell at CarlSamrock Public Relations at 818-260-0777 or karenpenhale@cs-pr.com orscornell@cs-pr.com.

MOTHERSHIP Track Listing:

Disc One
1. Good Times Bad Times
2. Communication Breakdown
3. Dazed And Confused
4. Babe I'm Gonna Leave You
5. Whole Lotta Love
6. Ramble On
7. Heartbreaker
8. Immigrant Song
9. Since I've Been Loving You
10. Rock And Roll
11. Black Dog
12. When The Levee Breaks
13. Stairway To Heaven

Disc Two

1. Song Remains The Same
2. Over The Hills And Far Away
3. D'Yer Maker
4. No Quarter
5. Trampled Under Foot
6. Houses Of The Holy
7. Kashmir
8. Nobody's Fault But Mine
9. Achilles Last Stand
10. In The Evening
11. All My Love

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME Track Listing

Disc One

1. Rock And Roll
2. Celebration Day
3. Black Dog*
4. Over The Hills*
5. Misty Mountain Hop*
6. Since I've Been Loving You*
7. No Quarter
8. The Song Remains The Same
9. Rain Song
10. The Ocean*

Disc Two

1. Dazed And Confused
2. Stairway To Heaven
3. Moby Dick
4. Heartbreaker*
5. Whole Lotta Love

* Not on original soundtrack release

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I haven't heard the previously unreleased material, and, in general, more Zeppelin is almost always a good thing. But it should be noted that of the three officially released live albums, The Song Remains the Same is by far the worst. I look forward to hearing the new material, but I doubt that it can fully redeem what was an uninspired effort.

In contrast, The BBC Sessions has some great live material, and a couple songs that are available in no other place. And the quite belated How the West Was Won, from 2003, is finally the live album set that Zep fans have clamored after for decades. It's one of the best live albums I've ever heard, and it's what should have been released instead of The Song Remains the Same way back in 1976.

Lindsay Lohan and Change

A noted alcohol/drug counselor on what Lindsay Lohan needs to do:

""Whatever you have done in the past, do a 360-degree turn and go the other way," Sands said Wednesday."

This is much harder to do than it sounds.

Fragile

We interrupt this musical lovefest to bring you an important announcement: people get sick. And when they get sick, sometimes you want to bludgeon your head against the wall.

Four people I know and love have gotten sick within the past couple weeks. And they’re very sick. My friend Fred had a mental breakdown, and will be hospitalized for the foreseeable future. My cousin Pam was diagnosed with breast cancer. My niece Sheila was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. And my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

In theological terms, these events often precipitate a crisis of faith based on theodicy, or the problem of evil. Basically, the argument goes like this: if God is so good, then why does such horrid shit happen to people? It’s a fair question, and if you’ve never lain awake at 3:00 a.m. and asked it, you will. Just give it time, because time is the great leveler of the just and the unjust, the blithely optimistic and the cynically jaded. I used to ask the Big Theodicy Question a lot. I don’t do it as much anymore, partly because I’ve experienced the reality of the goodness of God many times, partly because I’m perhaps not quite as stuck on myself as I once was, and am content to leave some mysteries alone. But maybe it’s just the nature of time. Because when you live long enough you get plenty of practice at this sort of thing, and although it never gets any easier, it does get more familiar. You find yourself sniffing, “what, a mere four life-changing catastrophes at one time? Mere child’s play.” But then there’s that 3:00 a.m. sucker punch, when you find yourself wide awake and staring at the ceiling. The questioning seems less intense. The sadness doesn’t, though.

On Monday I visited Fred over my lunch break, then headed back to the “real” world of Network Infrastructure Architecture. Fred sees theological significance in numeric patterns right now. At 12:15 I was contemplating the nature of the Trinity with Fred (sparked by his observation that there were three of us sitting around in a waiting room, drinking three cups of water), doing my best not to break into tears. At 1:15 I was in the middle of a meeting where people were shouting at one another, on the verge of apoplectic seizures because the Interactive Voice Recognition application did not work!!!! Instead of picking up a telephone and calling an insurance agent, people can now use the Internet and stare intently at an insurance company website and say “I want to talk to an agent,” and an agent will call them back. But it wasn’t working!!!! And people were ready to have coronaries over it.

I wanted to shout back, but I had nothing I wanted to add about Interactive Voice Recognition. I wanted to scream, “What’s wrong with you people? Don’t you have a clue about what is important and what is not important?” I didn’t. I bit my tongue, and did my very best Technical Writer Engaged with the Technical Proceedings impression, acting for all the world like I would toss and turn at night, deeply concerned because the poor, perplexed customer couldn’t talk to his computer monitor. But that’s not what I tossed and turned over later that night. I tossed and turned over Fred, and Pam, and Sheila, and my dad.

We are so fragile, terminal cases one and all, and the fucking Interactive Voice Recognition application isn’t the only thing that’s broken. Our bodies and our minds are broken. The whole world is broken. There’s nothing new or insightful there. This is an old, old story, dating back to a garden and a serpent, but it’s played out in countless variations every day, all over the planet. But sometimes the planet gets smaller, and less abstract. Sometimes the problem of theodicy is a local one, and becomes Fred’s problem, or my dad’s problem. I pray for mercy, for wholeness, for healing. I don’t know how else to pray. I pray for the ability to care, not to become jaded in the face of overwhelming need. And I pray for the ability to juggle those overwhelming needs with the ridiculous activities that take up our time and energies, for the ability to focus on Interactive Voice Recognition software when I think we should be working on trying to develop our God and Suffering recognition radar. I’d like to develop a project plan for that one. But there is no plan, or if there is, it is an inscrutable one. All I know is we’re all on the critical path, and I’d like to finish a little less broken than when I started.

5-Star Albums of 2007?

Yeah, I know, I just wrote that there haven't been any.

But there is one. The problem is that you can't buy it because it doesn't even exist in any official form. It's the debut album from Son Lux. If/when Ryan Lott finds a label for it, it will be my album of the year. It's a dark, brooding, uplifting, soaring beautiful mess of electronica and Radiohead angst and Bible verses. It's Lectio Divina with a beat. In the same way that Lectio Divina focuses on a small portion of the Scriptures, and that portion unfolds in new ways as you encounter it over time and in different circumstances, so too Ryan's music cycles through a phrase, a sentence, repeated again and again as the music shifts and shimmers behind him. It's brilliant. You'll hear truth and beauty in a whole new way. You should buy it. When you can.

A Down Year for Music?

It's been a year without masterpieces, the critical consensus moans. And the critical consensus is right. The Shins didn't change our lives, and Modest Mouse disappointed. Arcade Fire came through, sort of, and certainly didn't embarrass themselves. But nobody's released a certifiable 5-star album thus far in 2007, at least to my ears.

So has it been a disappointing year in music? Not at all. If no one has released a perfect album, many artists have come close. Here's a list of albums that are in 4- to 4.5 star territory for me, all of them released in the past seven months (or, in a few cases, about to be released). If I wouldn't take them to the mythical desert island, I'm still happy to have them near at hand, close to the CD player in the suburban den.

Panda Bear — Person Pitch
Frog Eyes — Tears of the Valedictorian
Devon Sproule — Keep the Silver Shined
Richard Thompson — Sweet Warrior
Arcade Fire — Neon Bible
Loudon Wainwright III — Strange Weirdos
Future Clouds and Radar — Future Clouds and Radar
Hallulujah the Hills — Collective Psychosis Begone
Antibalas — Security
The Clientele — God Save the Clientele
Graham Parker — Don’t Tell Columbus
The Weakerthans — Reunion Tour
Patty Griffin — Children Running Through
Wilco — Sky Blue Sky
Ryan Adams — Easy Tiger
Dungen — Tio Bitar
The Twilight Sad — Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters
Rickie Lee Jones — Sermon on Exposition Boulevard
Michelle Shocked — ToHeavenURide
Joe Henry — Civilians
Peter Case — Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John
The Mendoza Line — Thirty Year Low
Grinderman — Grinderman
John Reuben — Word of Mouth
Steve Earle — Washington Square Serenade
John Vanderslice — Emerald City
The Safes — Well, Well, Well
Damien Dempsey — To Hell or Barbados
The Broken West — I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On
Linda Thompson — Versatile Heart
The Bad Plus — Prog
The National — Boxer
Metric — Grow Up and Blow Away
Do Make Say Think — You, You’re a History in Rust
Pentangle — Now is the Time
Spencer Moore — Spencer Moore
Miranda Lambert — Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Galactic — From the Corner to the Block
Mavis Staples — We'll Never Turn Back
The Frames — The Cost
John Abercrombie — Third Quartet
The Avett Brothers — Emotionalism

And I'm still holding out hope for the new Radiohead and New Pornographers albums.