Face Up and Sing

Don’t worry, I’m not being fooled into taking Rolling Stone seriously, but the magazine’s list of the best 100 singers -- compiled by asking luminaries like Scott Weiland (ugh), Carrie Underwood (double ugh), and James Blunt (triple-axel ugh) -- is grist for the blogger’s mill. They arguably get it right at the top, with Aretha at number one. And several others in the top 20 are of the “No, duh” variety: Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Freddie Mercury.

But overall, the list looks like just another hodgepodge of the increasingly senile magazine’s deities. Bob Dylan seventh? Even allowing for a (rightly) unstuffy definition of “singer,” and even given that the pre-rock era doesn’t appear to count (no Frank Sinatra, no Billie Holliday, etc.) . . . seventh?? Ahead of Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder, Roy Orbison, and Etta James? And, Whitney Houston 18 places below Mick Jagger? And, Neil Young 39 places ahead of Steve Perry? Methinks we’re talking about more than singing here...

I won’t attempt any comprehensive list of my own, but here are a few mini-lists in reaction:

My five favorite ethereal female voices, a type of voice for which I have a notorious weakness: Natalie Merchant, Karen Peris (The Innocence Mission), Mimi Parker (Low), Lori Carson, Tracey Thorn (Everything But the Girl)

My three favorite falsettos: Maxwell, Barry Gibb, and Prince

Four singers who were on the Rolling Stone panel of voters who should have been on the list of singers: Sinead O’Connor, Daryl Hall, George Michael, and Sebastian Bach, a much better singer than Axl Rose, who represents metal screechers on the final list.

Pretty voices who were overlooked: Linda Ronstadt, Raul Malo (of The Mavericks and a solo career) and the perfect-pitched Alison Krauss

Young voices (among many) who were overlooked: Mark Kozelek, Neko Case, Amos Lee, and Ray LaMontagne

Six of my favorite voices who were overlooked, some more understandably than others: Tracy Chapman, Lyle Lovett, Michael Stipe, David Gray, Jay Farrar, and Neil Finn

American Music

Along with a handful of friends, I've been having a roundtable e-mail discussion about the best and most influential American rock bands. It's not a pretty picture. I think of the group, I'm the least concerned with a band's influence as a factor in judging their greatness, but giving it weight rightfully leads to a lot of talk about the Velvet Underground and Talking Heads and Big Star.

What initially astonished me was just how dominant the UK was in producing great/influential bands. The big three -- the Beatles, the Stones, the Who -- are obvious, but just behind them is a virtual avalanche: Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Police, U2, The Kinks, The Cure, Fleetwood Mac, The Smiths, Radiohead, etc. It's an incredibly impressive list, all the more so when you turn your attention to American bands. In my unsurprising opinion, the hands-down winner is REM, but I do say that with a straight face as well as a full heart. Despite some evidence to the contrary over the years, I can separate my personal opinions (I really like Journey's Greatest Hits) from more objective considerations (Journey is decidedly not one of the greatest or most influential American bands).

So, there's REM. And in my opinion, Uncle Tupelo's four very good records, and their unique blending of punk and country, and their influence on a great many bands that followed make them a solid choice. But when you go back to the most fertile time in rock, when many of the aforementioned Brits were storming our shores, we were a sad bunch. My friends are throwing around names like The Doors and The Byrds and CCR, all bands that had some very fine moments, but come on. No one seems to be as dispirited as I am by the names we're coming up with. Also mentioned: The Beach Boys, the Allman Brothers, the Ramones. And of course, we've mentioned some more recent bands, like Nirvana and Pearl Jam and the Beastie Boys.

I got less depressed about my nationality, though, when I realized two things: 1) The great music that gave birth to rock was definitely ours: Louis, Stevie, Aretha, on and on. And 2) when you move the focus from bands to individual artists, the U.S. starts redressing the balance. Yes, there's Elvis Costello and Van Morrison (and surely more that I'm forgetting), but they're up against Dylan, Springsteen, Paul Simon, Prince. This might say something about American individualism, but I'll spare all of us an amateurish unpacking.

Anyone care to defend another American band, or any of those listed above?

ASWOBA Radio

I just discovered, via Pop Candy, a great site that allows you to make playlists of songs and share them with others. Like, you. Each playlist is 45 songs, which seems like a bit much, but you're probably stuck to a desk for hours anyway. I don't know how to put the playlists in a particular order -- it seems to be playing the songs randomly -- so apologies for any problems with pacing, etc. In any case, my dream of playing DJ for my readers comes to fruition, I think. See if this works:

(Update: I've had some trouble getting the first song to play. But if that happens, clicking on "next track" on the right-hand side of the box below seems to help. OK, that's the last -- fourth -- time I edit this silly post.)

Remembrance of Horrible Lyrics Past

I guess it was late in 1991 when I first heard (and saw) the band Live on 120 Minutes. And despite the fact that the song was called "Operation Spirit (The Tyranny of Tradition)" and the album was called Mental Jewelry, I became a moderately admiring fan. I wish saying "Hey, it was the early 90s" explained things. It's truer to say that the band did a decent impression of the more earnest side of R.E.M., and that was pretty much all I needed at that time. The follow-up, Throwing Copper, continued to vocally and musically ape R.E.M. and U2 enough to make it enjoyable. So, having now, in the 21st century, allowed myself the dorky task of recreating much of my lifetime musical library with the help of iTunes, I went looking for my favorite songs off Throwing Copper to add to the tomb. And as much as they're not right up my alley anymore, they continue to sound...like they come from the alley across the street. We're not talking about Whitesnake levels of guilt here. We're not talking about the kind of guilt that makes one wish that one had never been a 13-year-old boy. The songs aren't that bad.

But I knew that at some point Live did become that bad -- that my natural move away from them was helped along by the band taking a massive turn for the worse. So I went one step further on my search, and took a (very) quick listen to some of Secret Samadhi -- the band's third album, and the one that couldn't be defended even by someone as stubbornly lame as me.

This brief trip into the past wouldn't have inspired a post, but my quest left me with something I always love sharing with you: terrible lyrics. Feast your eyes on a few of these...

From "Rattlesnake":

let's go hang out in a mall, or a morgue,
a smorgasbord
let's go hang out in a church
we'll go find Lurch

let's go hang out in a bar
it's not too far
we'll take my car

From "Graze":

people should not be afraid
the artist does figure eights
but will it stand the test of time
or will it rot like the mission that tried too hard

And finally, from "Century":

everybody's here
puke stinks like beer
this could be a city
this could be a graveyard
you stole my idea

everybody's anxious
for the coming of the crisis
the collapse of the justice
i can smell your armpits
you stole my idea
you stole my idea!

I'm pretty sure no one would be interested in stealing those "ideas."

I'm a big believer that what looks average on the page can be a good, smart lyric when interpreted by a singer, but this stuff is just awful, and nothing else on the record is any better. Of course, at this point I was 23, not 17, so I can't really pat myself on the back too hard for having realized at the time that it was trash.

Goats on the Bowery

You might remember me going on at length about the Mountain Goats a while back. There are very few bands/singers that I like a great deal who I haven't seen live, and after tonight, there's even one fewer. Saw the Goats tonight at the Bowery Ballroom, my favorite venue in the city.

This picture taken with my phone makes it seem like we were far(-ish) from the band, but we weren't. We were very close. It's just that camera phones, while pretty great, also kind of suck.


As you can gather from the band's discography, there isn't really a dearth of material from which to choose when they're on stage. But the set focused mostly on newer stuff, including a few songs from the very recently released (and very quiet) Get Lonely. Luckily, the crowd was respectful. You could hear a pin drop most of the night, which was necessary, because a few numbers were significantly quieter than a pin hitting the floor would have been. It's not a carpeted floor.

The band is mostly one guy, John Darnielle, and he's both a dynamic performer and a complete goofball. As Wikipedia puts it: "Since starting the band in 1991, (Darnielle) has gained a cult following despite the initial low quality of his recordings, his nasal voice, and primitive guitar playing. His popularity is often attributed to his prolific output and literary lyrics that many believe are matched by few other songwriters."

Those lyrics -- which are pretty impressive, by and large -- are held dear by the fans. The encore included "No Children," and with Darnielle's urging, everyone sang along. It wasn't quite as lopsided in the crowd's favor as this recent rendition in San Francisco, when Darnielle was running a fever and basically strummed the guitar while everyone else carried the song home, but it was fun to play our part.

And before I'm too hard on the phone camera, here's a shot I like more, taken outside the club right after the show:

In Da Club(s)

I remember occasionally picking up The Village Voice at a book store when I lived in Dallas, marveling at the music listings -- dozens of bands I wanted to see, all on the same page, all on their way to the same city. And when I first moved to New York, I was eager to take advantage of this ridiculous buffet of sonic offerings, and I did. But in the hard slog since, from 26 to 32, I've reached two conclusions: 1. I've seen the great majority of the bands I want to see at least once; and 2. Standing in the middle of rabid packs of 20-something hipsters during a mediocre opening-band's set has plummeted on my list of priorities, resting somewhere just above outdoor running in the summer and reading The Nation cover-to-cover each week. In the past year, I can barely remember seeing any concerts -- and the one I can remember, this past February, I left early out of boredom.

But I really need to make an effort to rejuvenate myself, because it's true that I find very few things as enlivening as a good show. Last week was a start. I saw Midlake and the Cold War Kids at a club in Brooklyn. Midlake is a band from Denton, Texas, and they put on a great show -- borrowing a bit from Radiohead and Granddaddy and, according to my fellow attendee, Fleetwood Mac. Cold War Kids, from L.A., were energetic and often locked into a pretty strong groove, but maybe relied a bit too much on their hipness quotient to put over their duller numbers. To my ear, they're heavily influenced by the White Stripes, and realizing there's a flight of new bands already calling back to the 2001 era made me feel, what's the word, ancient.

Then, Thursday night, I saw Calexico and the New Pornographers in Central Park. A smattering of rain passed through just as we arrived, which helped cool things off a bit (the four days leading up to that drizzle were just barely survivable around here, and it's pretty damn hot again -- fall, New York's best season, can't get here soon enough). Calexico was in good form, and the Pornos delivered a fun set, despite disappointingly being without sometime-vocalist Neko Case, whose voice is a force of nature.

Meanwhile, speaking of concerts, longtime rock critic and English mangler Robert Christgau recently had a piece in the Voice in which he recounts seeing 30 shows in 30 days. I have to give him credit, at his age, for being able to handle such an assignment. I'm half his age, and doubt I could go to a show each night for a week before gladly turning in my rock n' roll credentials. Still, it amazes me that people are (rightly) concerned about issues of torture around the planet, but no one is speaking out on behalf of Christgau's sentences. Take these two:

The mark of the letch is on Dulli, whose black attire lacks only the waistcoat his ample bay window requires, yet there's fascination in his endangered self-assurance.

Stylofone have one dynamite gimmick: doubled guitar leads on every hook, executed with joyous arena-rock everything-old-is-new.

Those aren't even that terrible by his standards, and I have to give him credit for these sentences elsewhere in the essay. They're pretty simple, but they get at something I relate to:

I'm a record guy, always will be. But records can't match the exhilaration of the best gigs. You walk home prepared to live forever.

Tom Reynolds Interview: Part Three

The concluding part, in which the author of I Hate Myself and Want to Die patiently answers a few more long-winded questions.

I didn’t want every question to be about depressing songs, because you certainly seem like a more general music fan, and I often geek out about music on the blog. So while I have you here, if you’d be so kind as to allow me to broaden the discussion, by first faking back in the direction of the book. Your essay about “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is hysterical, and all true, but I have to admit that I like that song. Probably because I heard it countless times when I was 12, and I have some strong theories about imprinting. Anyway, I’m smart (or self-conscious) enough to consider it a “guilty pleasure.” What are some songs -- depressing or not -- that you love, but might not cop to loving if a meddling blogger didn’t force you to do it?

Good lord, "Total Eclipse"? Can’t you hear the beating wings of death around Bonnie Tyler with every replay of that song? The banshee wailing outside the front door of the morgue, crypt, mausoleum, Disney ride, wherever the hell she recorded that thing?

To be honest, there were a slew of readers who took me to task for that song. One UK radio host even grilled me live on the air for choosing it. What’s really scary is that I hadn’t heard that song in two decades, but since my book came out I’ve heard it SEVEN TIMES! Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Guilty pleasures, eh? I’ll list guilty pleasure acts first. I’ll admit it, I like the Goo Goo Dolls. They write great hooks and can rock out when they want to (though I’m very over the theme song they did for that awful Nic Cage-Meg Ryan movie, City of Angels). I dig AC/DC, too, who’ve released the exact same album 14 times. Their rhythm section is fantastic, their vocalist shreds, and Angus Young is the greatest hard rock guitarist of all time. He’s never played a bad solo.

For guilty pleasure songs, I like "Footstompin’ Music" by Grand Funk Railroad, another critically-hated band, "Sookie Sookie" by Steppenwolf, most Three Dog Night singles, "Venus" by Bananarama, "Levon" by Elton John, "How Will I Know" by Whitney Houston (‘course, she was young and hot when she recorded it), "More More More" by Andrea True Connection (fantastic piano part in one of the world’s dumbest songs), "SOS" by ABBA, "Keep Yourself Alive" by Queen, "Outta Space" by Billy Preston (greatest demonstration of the clavinet ever), "You Gotta Move" by Gino Vanelli...

I’ll drop dead if I continue.

What’s the first album you can remember buying? What’s your favorite album that was released before you were 22, and your favorite album released since?

My first I ever got was a requested Christmas gift: "Four Wheel Drive" by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I loved the guitar solo on "Roll On Down the Highway," so I had to have it. First I ever bought was "Ain’t Life Grand" by Black Oak Arkansas, a poor man’s Lynyrd Skynyrd with three lead guitarists. It was fairly awful except for a cool cover version of the Beatles’ "Taxman."

Most of my favorite albums were released before I was 13. I was always into music that was eons before my time. Favorite pre-22 albums include Pink Floyd’s "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Wish You Were Here," The Who’s "Live At Leeds," Beatles’ "White Album," Traffic’s "John Barleycorn,” Raspberries "Greatest Hits," and Frank Zappa’s "One Size Fits All." (There are others, believe me.) (Ed. Note: I do.)

One I totally missed until last year (!) was Big Star’s "#1 Hit Record," their debut, released in 1973. Absolutely fantastic, literally every song on it is great and a few are brilliant, like "Ballad of El Goodo." The album was recorded over 30 years ago, yet it sounds like it was released in 2000. It’s that far ahead of its time (which is probably why it flopped).

Post-22, the list declines severely. I’d say the Police’s "Synchronicity, a few X albums, Dire Straits’ "Brothers in Arms," and Nirvana’s "Nevermind.” I mean we’re talking the 80s and 90s here, when everything went corporate and all that awful Ratt/Poison/ Warrant/Motley Crue/Slaughter shit was big. Thank God Nirvana killed it, but then the rest of Seattle took itself too seriously and just added to the sludge.

One post-22 obscure gem is the DBs’ "Sound of Music.” Great songwriting, clanging guitar work, and the drummer was the only white man in the past two decades who could play a hair behind the beat. Fantastic.

Sprinkled throughout the book are some seriously technical musical terms. (I’ve always felt a bit bone-headed for being such a big music fan and having not an ounce of technical knowledge.) Given that you’re also holding a guitar in your author photo, I assume you’re still a practicing musician yourself. I’m going to also assume, because it would keep this question from dying on the vine, that you have written songs of your own. True? And if so, have you ever written anything that would qualify as depressing or sad on some level? Generally, what type of music do you play, or have you played over the years?

The only songs I ever wrote were when I played piano and performed with sketch comedy troupes. I recall one I composed as the opening number when we were an all-male cast. The chorus went:

We’re boys, we’re men, we’re blades, we’re chaps,
we’re strapling lads and swains,
we’re virile manly macho hunks (point at each other) except for him.

Otherwise, I play piano jazz, which means I take a series of related chord progressions (secondary dominants, tritone substitutions, etc.) and grope around on them in a formless manner until the paint dries. Give me enough meth and I can fake an entire Keith Jarrett concert.

On guitar, it’s fingerstyle a la Leo Kottke, or weird open tunings with a lot of hammering. I also own a Strat and can do a credible solo version of Hendrix’s "Little Wing," because it doesn’t involve feedback, distortion, or setting anything on fire.

Your bio says you were a DJ in East Texas at one point. May I ask where and when? I lived in Dallas for 12 years, and I recently came across a funny quote from Hunter S. Thompson about that city: “Terrible place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” How was your experience in that state? It’s a great state for music in many ways, I found, but in certain pockets of course...

I lived in Texas during the late 80s, right out of college. I did radio in Jasper, a small town most noted for being the site where a black man was dragged to death in 1999. I was fired exactly the way George Jetson and Fred Flintstone got canned by their bosses: "Reynolds! Yoouuuuuuu’rrrrreeee FIRED!!" It was great.

I then produced training films in Beaumont, a refinery city near the Gulf, creating such masterpieces as "Safety Rules and Hazardous Chemicals in the AC Polyethylene Unit." The New York Times called it "...a laconic jargon-heavy production about making plastic, or something..."

I finally moved to Houston right when it was going through its worst recession in history. I suffered there a year doing more freelance production, including for a film that got a congressman nominated for president on the Libertarian ticket (seriously). I was paid $700 for it. Cheap-ass Libertarians.

Texas, in short, was an.....experience.

I posted a while back about the best concerts I’ve ever seen, and a few readers chimed in with their own lists. Would you mind listing some of your favorites, with whatever embellishment you’d like (memorable moments, complete set lists, photos you took of groupies flashing the band)?

First concert was Rush. I saw them in a high school gymnasium for $4. On my way there, a drunk Polish guy in a bowling shirt changed lanes and totaled our ‘67 Corvair. A cop gave me and my friend a ride to the concert because he was doing security there, unaware my friend had a bag of pot on him the whole time.

Also saw Jethro Tull, Jean Luc Ponty, Neil Young (solo), Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Who (we snuck in), The Other Ones (Grateful Dead w/o Jerry), Buddy Guy, Little Feat, Alanis Morissette, and most recently Richard Thompson, who was incredible. Did 1,000 years of music, starting with Chaucerian ballads and ending with Britney Spears.

One great show is French guitarist Pierre Bensusan. I’ve seen him twice and both times he was incandescent.

Do you keep up with contemporary music and, if so, have you heard anything lately that you’d recommend?

Coincidentally, I’ve been asked to work on a documentary about reggaeton, the Spanish-language hip-hop/rap music out of Puerto Rico. They have about fifty hours of footage and I have to put it together into a cohesive finished product that’s ninety minutes. Most of the interviews are in Spanish, a language I know as well as I do calculus and topiary.

I find reggaeton much more interesting than standard Snoop/Eminem/50 Cent rap, because it’s rhythmically complex and has machine-gun delivery. The big star is Daddy Yankee because of his hit "Gasolina," his weakest tune. He has better songs than that.

Lastly, I’ve posted some of my favorite passages from the book this week, but I wanted to commend you on a particular moment, which is when you write this about “Seasons in the Sun”: “I can still remember when I was young and radio stations played this song every hour on the hour; it was the traffic report of pop singles.” Great line. So, there’s not really a question there. Thanks for taking the time, and I hope you’re getting plenty of aural serotonin these days. You deserve it after all you’ve been through.

Tom Reynolds Interview: Part Two

In which the author of I Hate Myself and Want to Die explains why The Smiths didn't make the cut, why Harry Chapin is sicker than Slayer, and why I'm (mostly) forgiven for my affection for Counting Crows. (The third and final part will be posted later tonight or tomorrow.)

You write: “Selecting the most depressing Cure song is like choosing your favorite locust in a locust swarm: You pretty much have your pick, but does it really make any difference?” You went with “Prayers for Rain” as your locust, but what were some of the other final candidates from The Cure?

To be honest, I included the grim goth groups like the Cure, Nine Inch Nails, etc., because I figured I was expected to. Those were hard because I find their music to be less depressing since the gloominess is intentional. With The Cure, I didn’t find them quite as gloomy as The Smiths, if only because Robert Smith isn’t as sexually tortured as Morrissey is. Song-wise, “The Drowning Man” and “All Cats Are Grey” were two candidates, but I’m very proud that I chose “Prayers for Rain,” because even die-hard Cure fans missed that one. A few were even pissed off about it.

The Smiths aren't included in the book, for reasons that I remember reading about, and that you may or may not go into here, as you see fit. When I told a friend they were a last-minute omission, he said, “Yes, the original subtitle was ‘The 127 Most Depressing Songs You’ve Ever Heard.’ ” I’m a pretty big Smiths fan, and I’m wondering what two or three songs of theirs you find most depressing, and why.

That The Smiths aren’t included in the book has been the bane of my publishing existence. I’m still getting slammed by critics, bloggers, and depressing music aficionados because of it. The truth is, I’d planned to include one of several of their songs but my original UK publisher, Sanctuary Books, was a division of Sanctuary Group, which was also Morrissey’s record company at the time. They sent my analysis of “Miserable Lie” to his management as a “courtesy,” since he was on their roster. Suffice to say, they weren’t happy and demanded it be removed. And that’s why no Smiths songs made the book.

As far as depressing Smiths songs go, they’re just like The Cure: you pretty much have your pick. Besides “Miserable Lie,” there was “I Know It’s Over,” “Girlfriend in a Coma,” “Suffer Little Children,” etc. Actually, most of their albums are doom-fests, though Johnny Marr was a great guitar player, very innovative.

You’re very caustic and funny about every band in the book, but there seem to be a few cases where you really twist the knife in the song, but make an effort to protect the artist’s overall catalog from your wrath. I’m thinking of your pieces on Springsteen (“The River”), Billy Joel (“Captain Jack”), Ben Folds (“Brick”), and even Whitney Houston to a degree (“I Will Always Love You”). Am I right about those in particular? And which five singers or groups mentioned in the book do you most unironically enjoy when you’re not eviscerating them for readers?

I didn’t want readers to get the impression I didn’t like these artists, even though I’ve never been the biggest Boss fan (sorry, Asbury Park). Pundits have impaled Billy Joel far more viciously than I ever could have and Whitney I just plain feel sorry for (she needs to dump that Bobby idiot muy pronto if she ever wants a career again).

As far as artists listed in the book, I’ve always been a huge Pink Floyd fan, including the nutty early stuff with Syd Barrett (RIP Madcap). It’s just The Wall is.....too much. That’s when Roger Waters started going too nutso.

Others include Joy Division, The Carpenters (seriously), Jimmy Webb, The Doors (“Peace Frog” kicks ass), Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. The Verve Pipe has done a few good songs, Bobby Darin is kitschy fun, and Billie Holiday’s a legend.

You chose “Round Here” by Counting Crows as one of the 52. I particularly like this observation about the song’s main character, Maria, since I’ve often found this lyric perplexing myself: “So, yeah, Maria’s a little odd. She’s not very bright, either, since Duritz sings how she left Nashville and came all the way to the West Coast to find a guy ‘who looks like Elvis’ (correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Memphis right down the highway from Nashville?)” The question here is a brief one (feel free to expound, though). Trying to leave aside the fact that you don’t know me at all, on a scale of 1 to 10 -- 1 being no change and 10 being the equivalent of finding Nazi memorabilia in my attic -- how much of your respect do I lose by admitting that I’m a fairly unrepentant Counting Crows fan?

None whatsoever. I have their first album from whence “Round Here” comes and it’s a great debut. But that song got played to death and I got more dispirited each time I heard it, especially when Maria “is thinking of jumping....” And I believe we both have scary memories of seeing Counting Crows perform this song years ago on Saturday Night Live and Duritz looked like his meds had just worn off. He went through a very self-indulgent eccentric phase which became increasingly more annoying and every reviewer at their concerts made note of it. Their most recent stuff I find very uninspired and phoned-in, especially that Whatever in Love song they did for the Shrek movie. Awful.

You divide the book up into categories, the last of which is Perfect Storms, which you describe this way: “Perfect storms occur when songwriters, attempting to create an emotionally affecting song, swing for the catharsis fence but end up fouling into the grandstand, wiping out 1,000 nuns and orphans. There’s an inherent cluelessness to perfect storms, with the perpetrator completely unaware of the catastrophe that’s been unleashed. They’re the audio equivalent of a Donner Party guide loudly insisting he knows the way through the pass.” Given the cluelessness you describe, do you think it’s at all possible to sit down and purposefully -- even malevolently -- create a Perfect Storm? I often have this argument with friends, about whether or not we could consciously write a successful dumb-but-bestselling novel that adheres to certain genre requirements. I usually argue we couldn’t, or we’d do it and be stinking rich (otherwise, we’re choosing not to become stinking rich, which makes us even more incredibly stupid than we are for having the debate in the first place).

In my opinion, it’s impossible to intentionally write a Perfect Storm depressing song because, like “camp,” the main quality to one is Unawareness. If you set out to purposely write the most depressing song ever, you’ll just end up with a jokey one.

If I may be so bold, I refuse to see any play, musical, one-act, revue, whatever that bills itself as being “camp,” because I know it’s going to suck. If two East Village playwrights collaborate on a musical called “Bikini Zombie Massacre A Go Go,” and cheerfully declare it a “camp” production, I will Molotov it with flaming bottles of Rex-all brand vodka.

Like depressing songs, camp has to be unintentional and I will duel anybody who disagrees. It has to be so bad that it's good, and the reason it's bad is BECAUSE the author honestly feels he or she created something great. Plan 9 from Outer Space is a classic camp movie because Ed Wood thought it was a masterpiece. Rocky Horror Picture Show, while entertaining, is not camp. It’s just a silly musical.

This is why most goth, death metal, emo, et al., bores the shit out of me. Its listeners bring a whole lot of their own baggage to it, which is why it’s easy to write a so-called "dark" goth song. No, it takes a truly sick mind to write an appalling tune like "The Shortest Story," Harry Chapin’s earnest ode to a malnourished African baby, than some tedious swill by Slayer.

Tom Reynolds Interview: Part One

In which the author of I Hate Myself and Want to Die explains why he doesn't have time for Portishead fans, why Smashing Pumpkins should be dragged in front of the Hague, and why following The Who is always a risky proposition.

First things first. For a solid month or two after you finished writing the book, did you detox by listening to "Good Vibrations" on a continuous loop? Be honest.

By the time I handed in the final song chapter, I'd also finished up working on a reality dating show. My gloom had been exacerbated by the daily viewing of video footage featuring people much younger and more attractive than me getting free drinks while making out in bars. So I "detoxed" by listening to a lot of solo guitar music by musicians like Michael Hedges, who basically torture Martin guitars by beating the crap out of them while still creating incredible music.

How did you come to the book idea, and what method did you use to weed through and select the songs? Many of the choices are pretty obscure and you seem to dislike them intensely (and hilariously), so I’m assuming you either depended on suggestions from others or you have the world’s strangest/most self-hating record collection.

I literally received a phone call from a publishing company in England that asked if I was willing to spend a year listening to depressing songs and find the most suicide-inducing ones. In hindsight, I think it was a prank phone call that I unfortunately fell for.

The first thing was making sure a song was depressing rather than sad. Depressing songs don't make me cry, they just make me lie on my bed and count the dots on the ceiling. There's a certain apathy-and-ennui effect they should have on the listener. Sad songs put a lump in your throat; depressing songs make you feel like the lump itself.

As there are way more than 52 depressing songs in the world, I knew I needed help. People sent me lists upon lists of song titles, and having worked in radio, I also revisited a lot of hit tunes that flailed me for years while I tried to figure out why they were popular. Most of the songs in the book were hits at one time, which is important because one aspect of a depressing song for me is the chance you're going to keep hearing it. That's why I don't have time for alt-music snobs who bitch about why I didn't include some obscure track off Portishead's second album. I can pull up 20,000 songs just like it that are dark and pessimistic, yet nobody's ever heard them. Plus, those songs are intentionally depressing, which means they're only going to bore me to death.

The ones that suck my serotonin dry are usually trying to be profound and moving. I find Springsteen's working-class ballads much more depressing than Nick Cave.

Was there a uniform procedure for each song, in terms of how many times you would listen to it, how you would test its depressing factors, etc.?

Many I turned off after 30 seconds because I knew they weren't potential candidates. If it was a song I'd never heard before, then I had to listen for the "clueless" factor, wherein the singer doesn't seem to be aware of how depressing the song is.

There were a few I already knew I was going to include even before I started writing, like "Seasons in the Sun," "Honey," the teenage car crash songs, and Smashing Pumpkins’ cover of "Landslide," which is still a crime against mankind. Often-times, an artist succumbs to a try-and-top-this mentality and goes bananas overselling a depressing song they're remaking. Celine Dion took one of the most depressing songs ever, Eric Carmen's "All By Myself," and made it even more depressing with her incessant caterwauling and one of the most violent key changes in recorded music history. I call them Brain Concussion Modulations.

You write that you listened to twelve different versions of "Send in the Clowns" as part of your research. Was that the low point of the endeavor? If not, at what point did you most feel like you might not be able to go on (with the project, life, or both)?

Alas, "Send in the Clowns" has been covered by 150 different artists and I somehow listened to most of them, including Grace Jones’ disco version. Still, there were many low points, like listening to seven different versions of "Honey" just to gird myself for finally dealing with Bobby Goldsboro's original. I also recall searching almost two days for Vikki Carr's abysmal "It Must Be Him" because no music site seemed to have it (when you listen to it, you realize why). And I did become a sobbing wreck while watching the video for Johnny Cash’s cover of "Hurt."

But I think it was the amount of sheer research I did that made me question what I was doing with my life. When you spend an entire afternoon cross-checking facts about Phil Collins and Barry Manilow while right down the street is a neighbor who sold a screenplay for six figures, you wonder about your place in the cosmos.

Given that you seem to detest most of these choices (for good reason), I’m curious – what would you say is your favorite of the 52, the song you could listen to outside the confines of this task without purposefully swerving into a telephone pole? Based on your essays, my guess would be either "Last Kiss" by the Cavaliers or "The Freshmen" by the Verve Pipe. Am I close?

You’re dead-on. I really liked those two songs, whatever snarky comments I made about them. Also, the Carpenters’ "Goodbye to Love" has really grown on me, even the incompetent fuzz guitar solo that’s stuck in it. I now think Joy Division’s "Love Will Tear Us Apart" is near-brilliant and I wish I could rewrite my analysis of it. Loretta Lynn’s "Women’s Prison" is a cool gloomy song, and "Captain Jack" by Billy Joel has good music to it.

One that I’ve developed a perverse fondness for is Bloodrock's "D.O.A.," which freaked me out when I first heard it on the radio as a little kid. It’s still one of the worst songs ever written, but I can’t help liking it (or not hating it). Plus, I can't get over how REM used to cover it in their early concerts for pure irony’s sake.

You make a good distinction between depressing songs and sad songs, when you write: "In short, sad songs offer the listener empathetic comfort, reflection, and wisdom. Depressing songs just make you want to stick a Glock-9 in your mouth." And you follow that later with a specific example: "For anyone wishing to understand the difference between a depressing song and a sad song, there’s no better example than 'Hurt.' (Trent) Reznor’s version is depressing; (Johnny) Cash's remake is sad." Could there be a follow-up book about the best 50 sad songs, and what are some of your favorites? (This assumes you like a number of sad songs, if they stay on the right side of the divide you describe. Correct me if I’m wrong, though, and you’re just always listening to Bobby McFerrin or something.)

If Reznor had never written "Hurt," I doubt I would've included any Nine Inch Nails songs. Like "March of the Pigs" is supposed to depress me?

Since I'm at my best as a writer when I'm being an asshole, I doubt I'd ever write a Best Of book. But I'm a huge fan of sad songs and have spent many hours wallowing in them (when you live in Hollywood, you tend to do a lot of that). My favorite sad songs would include:

1. Night Comes In - Richard Thompson
2. Sugar Mountain - Neil Young
3. Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd
4. Belong - REM (mostly instrumental but still haunting)
5. Take it to the Limit - Eagles (who I normally dislike but Randy Meisner sang it)
6. Name - Goo Goo Dolls (you heard me. They're a guilty pleasure of mine)
7. Luka - Suzanne Vega
8. Moonlight Mile - Rolling Stones

This is just a sampler. There are tons more.....

(Ed. Note: I love "Belong," as you might have guessed. "Take it to the Limit" is one of maybe two Eagles songs that I can stomach, and actually enjoy. And I really like that Goo Goo Dolls song. I knew I wanted Tom to visit for a reason.)

You tell a very funny story in the book about getting up in front of a friend’s church congregation when you were in college and playing guitar while the friend sang Harry Chapin’s "The Shortest Story" – a song that, based on your description, seems to be about hungry international infants being devoured by vultures on Christmas morning. The congregants were rightfully horrified. Which leads me to ask, have you ever attended a concert when a band particularly tested an audience’s patience for depression?

For depression, not really, especially since I never attended Lilith Fair (the mere thought of sitting in a sea of lit candles while Sarah McLachlan sings "In the Arms of the Angel" is enough to make me feed myself to wolverines). But testing an audience’s patience, absolutely.

I can still remember when a jazz fusion band called Sweetbottom featuring Phil Collins’ guitarist, Daryl Stuermer, came to my college in Wisconsin to perform. They had to follow The Who, or more precisely, a Who movie.

The organizers first showed "The Kids Are Alright," the famous Who documentary, then had Sweetbottom perform afterwards. After two hours of guitar smashing and "Won't Get Fooled Again," the last thing anybody wanted to hear was an anal-retentive fusion band playing music geek jazz-rock. The poor guys noodled the entire audience out of the auditorium.

"I never wanted to be your weekend lover"

I love that line.

"Purple Rain" is a great song, in my opinion, and plenty depressing enough to fit this week’s vibe. Having seen most of the movie it comes from last weekend on HBO, and being astonished anew at its...Purple Rain-ness..., I figured it would be doubly timely to post the YouTube clip below of the performance from the film.

I came to have a deep respect for Prince late(r) in life, but in 1985, I was going to confirmation classes at my church sporting a T-shirt with an iron-on decal of Michael Jackson’s Thriller cover. To me, Prince was, at best, "that guy who sings 'When Doves Cry.' "

So I didn’t see Purple Rain until college or so, I’m guessing, and of course wasn’t impressed. I’m still not, but it’s bracing to see, in the same movie, such goodness (five or six great songs) alongside such badness (everything else).

It’s a shame this performance -- the dramatic climax of the movie, such as it is, and not to be confused with the earlier climaxes involving Apollonia, which brought the project to the verge of an X rating -- is canned, and not live (the song was recorded live, I believe, for the soundtrack, making it especially annoying they didn’t film a live version for the screen).



Prince never gets enough credit for being one of the best guitar players in recent memory. I guess he made it hard to focus on that looking like he does throughout the movie, like someone who spent most of the ‘80s auditioning to be the bass player for Sexual Chocolate. His appearance and his mushy spirituality made him more likely to be singled out by fans like “poison2funke,” a commenter on YouTube who wrote the following:

Prince is my soul mate. if youre reading this Prince...im more than an illusion. Take a dare. Take a voyage. i know what you feel. i know your trip. dont be scared. journey into the person i am.

Strange, yes, but I guess that’s what a guy gets from his fans when he’s penned lyrics like, “I’m not human, I am a dove.”

But do yourself a favor (even if you already subjected yourself to the clip above) and watch the live performance below from a 1985 awards show. The whole thing is pretty incendiary, especially the guitar solo. If you’ve watched any awards shows in the past 15 years, does this not make you amenable to arguments that everything is getting worse? I mean, this performance was on an awards show? Sure, he’s dressed like Liberace, but he also seems to be channeling, in turn, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and James Brown. Not bad.

You should really watch the whole thing, but the solo starts at 4:12 or so and it’s something. Lionel Richie, looking as spangled as ever, introduces the band with this statement: "There’s been a revolution in American music. It’s not just for listening anymore, it’s for looking," referring to the dawn of MTV’s day. They're sad words in light of the performance that follows, since MTV’s friendliness to young guys with six-pack abs and even younger girls with pigtails and...well, six-pack abs...has long kept attention from being focused on truly great musicians like Prince. Not that there are many like him out there, but if there is somebody, kids today are increasingly unlikely to know. Enjoy:

Calling All Third Persons

After my very recent post about songwriters, Nick thought it would be fun to come up with a list of the best songs written from the third person. And he's right, it would be. If it was easier.

After thinking about this for most of the day, the only purely third-person pop/rock song I can come up with is "Jack and Diane." There are several great narrative songs I can think of that clearly don't reflect the songwriter as the "I" or "me" -- Springsteen's one of the best at this, and his "Atlantic City" and "Highway Patrolman" are terrific examples -- but they're still written from the first person.

So, I'll open this up a bit. If you've got any third-person songs you love, please share them in the comments. Otherwise, I'll accept great story songs of any type.

The Solipsism of Songwriting

If you're still wondering if the average musician is an egomaniac, in my iTunes library I have 198 songs whose titles begin with the words “I’m,” “I’ve,” “I’ll” and “I.” Most of them are pretty straightforward -- "I Can't Make You Love Me," "I Don't Want to Get Over You," "I Have My Reasons" -- but then there's "I Love That Party with the Monkey Kitty." Oooo-kay.

Granted, I currently have 5,372 songs on there, so maybe 198 doesn't seem so much, but those are just the song titles that start with those words. Granted, also, that there are over 100 songs that start with some variation of "you," but a closer look reveals titles like "You Belong to Me," "You Don't Know Me," "You Know Where to Find Me," and "You Will Miss Me When I Burn," all of which seem to lean back toward the "I" category, no?

The reason I know this is not because I've become an obsessive shut-in with absolutely nothing better to do (though that stage isn't far off, I think), but because in order to approach my music selection with a fresh eye, I've reordered the alphabetical listing from artists to individual songs.

Hmm, I thought that would make it sound less geeky somehow. Oh well.

Music Recommendation: Hotel Lights

Darren Jessee was the drummer for Ben Folds Five, co-wrote several songs for them, and now leads this band, Hotel Lights. It's quiet-but-melodic fare, with traces of Will Oldham but a bit more ornamental than his stuff. And if you don't like Ben Folds (though I do), that doesn't matter, because it doesn't sound like him.

I liked the record (self-titled) the first time I heard it, but it's also really grown on me in a pleasing way, and almost nothing does that these days. By the third or fourth time through, the songs will really burrow their way into your head. My favorite track is probably "What You Meant," but there are lots of standouts -- "You Come and Go," "Miles Behind Me," and "Motionless" being tops among them.

I haven't discovered many bands in the past year or so that I would heartily recommend, but I think this is one of them.

Great Moments in Songs

Relatively new Cleveland-based blog Good Hodgkins asked music bloggers to list their favorite "visceral moment" from a song. For example, one person lists a moment from "Westfall" by Okkervil River and writes: "But oh, that moment that Sheff pronounces 'Evil don’t look like anything' with a punch at the end of a hushed verse and the rest of the band takes up the call. It literally made my hair stand on end the first time I heard it."

You get the point.

I imagine this type of list will satisfy Laura Miller, my younger sister, and others who think that listing things depreciates them, because this seems to be about delving further into something rather than standing back so far that judgment becomes flip or meaningless.

So, here are a few moments for me (picked pretty randomly out of what could be thousands, I think). Feel free to leave your own in the comments.

"Not Forgotten You" by Kelly Willis -- When Willis sings, "And I said 'Hail the western bound/with its black tail flying/lay on the rails and leave me to dream/of when your love was mine." The way she stutters the "i" in mine and then the organ comes in right after.

"My Life" by Iris Dement -- Pretty much the whole song, but the way she sings the chorus -- "but I gave joy to my mother/and I made my lover smile/and I can give comfort to my friends when they're hurting/and I can make it seem better for a while" -- kills me every time.

"Funny" by Trash Can Sinatras -- The way he freaks out singing the last verse. I found a guess at a translation online, but I'm only convinced about some of this -- "and when the cap fits I'll wear it/and if I knew what made carpets fly/wouldn't be sitting here twiddling my thumbs in a bar/I'd threadbare my soul and wheedle my way into other people's lives/and out of my own." ("Threadbare" doesn't make sense as a verb, I know, but there is a lot of silly wordplay on the rest of the album, so who knows.)

"Smile" by Pearl Jam -- Both times the music shifts and Vedder soars in with "I miss you already(-eady-ay-ay)."

"Settled Down" by Richard Buckner -- A great song, the best of several good ones added on to a reissue of his first album. Visceral moment is when he goes up high, cracking a bit to sing the "now" in "I'm younger now/history, my dear friend/years away, you say my name/I'm settled down, but I won't give up again." Really, really pretty.

Then there are impressively sustained visceral performances, like most of Patty Griffin's vocals on the album Living With Ghosts or Ray LaMontagne's through most of Trouble or the entirety of Radiohead's performance on The Bends.

Quiz: How Racist is Your iPod?

John Cook has a piece on Slate grappling with the fact that Sasha Frere-Jones and Jessica Hopper, two music critics, have lobbed charges of racism at Stephin Merritt, the fey leader of The Magnetic Fields.

Why the charges? Merritt had the audacity to be the millionth person (or so) to wonder if much of today's rap music isn't, er, racist. From the Slate piece:

"I think it's shocking that we're not allowed to play coon songs anymore," Merritt said, "but people, both black and white, behave in more vicious caricatures of African-Americans than they had in the 19th century. It's grotesque. ... It probably would have been considered too tasteless for the Christy Minstrels." In the same interview, he made the moral error of not liking OutKast, whose single "Hey Ya!" was at the time serving as America's background music: "I'm desperately sick of hearing it."

Around the same time, in a New York magazine interview, Merritt again dared to publicly express his boredom with OutKast and furthermore said of Justin Timberlake: "I'm not really exposed to him except as a photographic image. He gives good photo shoot." Of Beyoncé and Britney Spears: "[Spears] would be absolutely meaningless if we didn't see pictures of her. Beyoncé is not famous for her songs, she's famous for that outfit. Which is not necessarily a bad thing."

A reasonable person would understand two things from these comments: 1) that Merritt believes contemporary popular music, whether it's produced by white people (Timberlake and Spears), or black people (Beyoncé), to be more concerned with selling an image than recording and performing songs; and 2) that, like much of America, he had heard as much OutKast as he cared to.

I'm not sure why Hopper is flattered with inclusion in the debate since, based on one of the links provided in the piece (which seems not to work anymore; very interesting), her lack of clarity in expression seems matched only by her inability to spell. (I really wish I could link to what was originally there, but it seems to have disappeared. It was a doozy about "whiteness.")

Frere-Jones is in a band that Cook calls "quite good," and based on the sound files to which we're directed, I’d say that description is just a generous way of making up for the rest of the piece’s assault. Based on a quick listen, the band sounds to me like a bad Lenny Kravitz cover act, which means, yes, worse than Lenny Kravitz.

The entire feud, if you can call it that, seems very silly to me. As Cook writes: "...the whole of their sustained attack against Merritt is founded on the dangerous and stupid notion that one's taste in music can be interrogated for signs of racist intent the same way a university's admissions process can: If the number of black artists in your iPod falls too far below 12.5 percent of the total, then you are violating someone's civil rights."

Still, I'm worried. New York is the type of place where this Slate piece might lead to judgmental strangers hijacking one's iPod at a party to search for signs of latent racism (despite the fact that both you and these strangers are probably at a party where 49 of the 50 guests are white and 27 out of the 50 have almost identical bedhead). So, to preempt any suspicion about me, here's a partial and random rundown of those on my iPod who can attest to my belief in racial harmony: Aretha Franklin, Ben Harper, Billie Holiday, De La Soul, Dexter Gordon, Donny Hathaway, Ella Fitzgerald, Kanye West, Louis Armstrong, Marvin Gaye, Maxwell, Miles Davis, Ohmega Watts, Otis Redding, Prince, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Sarah Vaughan, and Stevie Wonder. Oh, and: The Magnetic Fields.

The Artists Formerly Known as Mookie Blaylock

Having already blogged about Counting Crows just days ago, I threaten to truly become musically irrelevant if I turn around so soon and write about Pearl Jam. But listen, it's not all Other Music staff picks in my household, no sir. So why not let you in on that reality? I'm not proud.

The fact is, I own nothing by Pearl Jam after Yield, and even that was just a flailing in the direction of raw youth, which youth was, at that very moment, boarding a train (or a supersonic jet). (Though I must say, "In Hiding," off that record, is one of my favorite songs by them.) Vitalogy -- and I imagine this is true of many of you -- was the last thing I bought with even a glimmer of hopefulness. (And of course, I could've taped the best two singles from that one off the radio and not been much worse off.)

These musings are inspired by the fact that the band's forthcoming album is being trumpeted as a "return to form," though I'm not eager to hear it.

Still, stumbling past the band's performance on Saturday Night Live two weeks ago, I was reminded of the goofy teenage enthusiasm I had for them. (I remember once -- honestly -- somberly recounting a portentous dream that involved Eddie Vedder to a high school confidant.) Vedder's voice is still powerful -- if sometimes melodramatic -- in my opinion, so it's a shame that the other band members seem so dull in their increasingly chugging, all-the-raggedy-of-punk-with-none-of-the-fun compositions. By all accounts, they're still something to see live. (I wouldn't know about any of that, since the one time I scored tickets -- for a show in Austin in 1994 -- they were in the midst of their war with Ticketmaster and ended up canceling the show for some ethical reason that remains lost on me. When they rescheduled, the date conflicted with tickets I had to see R.E.M. for the first time. No contest.)

Really, I only want to say two things, the first a critical judgment and the second just another in a long line of oh-dear-god-I'm-getting-old revelations:

1. Pearl Jam's best songs are still pretty good. Ten kind of sucked in retrospect, aside from maybe "Porch" and "Release," which makes it funny that much of Vs. still sounds enjoyable, since none of us initially listened to that record with anything but thoughts about how it stacked up to Ten. And I imagine there are decent songs studded throughout the past few albums, but I'll be damned if I'll be sent trawling for them. I found two covers they did online recently -- of Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down" and The Who's "Baba O'Riley" -- and they proved, to me anyway, that Pearl Jam has the chops and the voice to be a great interpretive band. Unfortunately, they're just not particularly good at writing their own stuff.

2. It's 2006. Ten came out in 1991. That means that, for a high school senior today, Ten is the equivalent of what Fleetwood Mac's Rumours was for me and my graduating class. Meaning: Cool on some level (maybe), but ancient. If you'll excuse me, I have to go check the mail for my AARP application.

Had To Be There: Favorite Concerts

You people seem to like sharing your opinions, so I'm hoping this post will send you scurrying to the comments section.

It's a simple list of the best concerts I've seen, with only the first one "ranked" and the rest all honorable mentions. Inspired by a discussion tonight with a lovely woman over a plate of about 3,000 French fries. (I love fries and can put them away, but the volume of them served at many restaurants and pubs is a subject worthy of study. It's shocking.)

OK, back to the concerts. First place, hands down:

Prince (Reunion Arena, Dallas, December 1998)

Despite the fact that I had always loved Prince in a radio-exposure kind of way, this show did benefit from moderate expectations. I figured it would be fun, but it wasn't like the indie-rock shows in cramped clubs that I spent months at a time anticipating. This was a Star -- one I assumed would be arrogant and a bit difficult -- playing a basketball arena. Our seats were in the upper deck.

What ensued was insanely entertaining. Prince stands at about three feet, five inches. He's tiny. To command an arena of that size the way he did must mean that he has more charisma per square inch than anyone in history (maybe even Napoleon; I believe Prince, if he had lived during that time, would have convinced people to help him conquer Russia in winter. But they would've won.) Most shockingly to me, at the time, his performance could only be called generous. He ripped up the guitar; he belted piano ballads; he playfully censored himself during "Darling Nikki"; he brought the house lights up near the end, then invited a large and random group of fans on stage to dance during an extended jam (during which time he shouted at one elderly woman who was getting down, "Dance, Grandma!") -- a grand finale if I've ever seen one; but no, then the lights vanished again and he launched into an extended medley of greatest hits. I remember the whole thing as being ridiculous in the best possible way.

Honorable mentions (dates might be blurry; I've tried)...

Lyle Lovett (Majestic Theater, San Antonio, 1994?)

Joan Osborne (Caravan of Dreams, Fort Worth, Spring 1995)

Radiohead (The Woodlands, Houston, September 1995, opening for R.E.M. in support of The Bends)

Centro-matic (I forget the name of the place. It was small. Dread Pirate, it was when they shared the bill with Mary Lou Lord. Oh, I think it was called The Galaxy Club, yes?, Dallas, 1998? 1999?)

Whiskeytown (Trees, Dallas, January 1998. Like viewing the aftermath of a car wreck with a few good songs occasionally floating over the scene.)

The Jayhawks (Gypsy Tea Room, Dallas, May 2000)

Built to Spill (Irving Plaza, New York, September 2001)

The Innocence Mission (Southpaw, Brooklyn, April 2004)

Ray Lamontagne (Bowery Ballroom, New York, January 2005)

I Wanna Be Mike Skinner. Man, That's Just About As Funky As You Can Be.

Adam Duritz bonds with humble fan, considers writing decent song.

Duritz attends premiere with Mary Louise Parker, beautiful actress about whom he will soon write a cringe-inducing song.

UK rapper Mike Skinner has a pint while trying to figure out how to write about fame without turning into Duritz-like creature.

A bit Slate-heavy the last couple of days, forgive me, but the site also had a review of The Streets' forthcoming third record today. (For clarity moving ahead, The Streets is basically one guy named Mike Skinner, pictured above.)

Everything I've read mentions that the album focuses on the trials and tribulations of life post-fame, and I agree with Slate's Jody Rosen that this is usually a bad sign. I'll leave aside judgment on this particular record until I've heard it. (Rosen likes it; other assessments have been more mixed. Many critics raved more about Skinner's second album, A Grand Don't Come for Free, than his first, Original Pirate Material. I felt the follow-up was a slight disappointment, if only slight -- the lyrics, key to Skinner's appeal, seemed less inspired to me on Grand, but its best songs were more mature and fully realized than the best on the debut. Long story short: I'm bracing myself for a letdown.)

But about fame: What could be more boring? I remember when Counting Crows hit it big -- a band many of you probably despise. The reason I liked (and still like) "Mr. Jones" is because the song sympathetically but critically addresses its subjects, people desperate for stardom because of a craving that stardom could never fill. The song's power, if you think it has any apart from a pretty good hook, comes from the intersection of their striving and the meaninglessness of that striving. Even if you think the message is still too obvious, the song gets its point across by plainly expressing the dream of its characters. When Adam Duritz sings, "We're gonna be big stars," you're not supposed to think, "Yes, and then they'll be happy!"

Duh, right?

The rest of the first album was full of hand-wringing, depressive but pastoral/rustic, existential love songs. Then, the follow-up album was lousy with caterwauling about dating movie stars and life as a rock star, expressed in solipsistic blather like this:

I was out on the radio starting to change
somewhere out in America
it's starting to rain
could you tell me the things you remember about me?

Yes. I remember you were a decent songwriter.

(Luckily, Duritz recovered, within reason. He's still a self-dramatizing sad sack, and you have to like that to like him, but the band's last, Hard Candy, featured some really good songs alongside some mediocre ones.)

Anyway, the most irritating thing he did around the time of the second album was change the lyrics of "Mr. Jones" to reflect his own stardom. Toward the end of the song, instead of singing "When everybody loves you, that's just about as funky as you can be," he sang "When everybody loves you, that's just about as f---ed up as you can be." Nothing like a sledge hammer to drive home a point. Poor baby.

The point of all this rambling (and there was a lot more of it than I had planned, so: sorry, sorry, sorry) is that Mike Skinner has been appealing -- way more than Duritz, obviously -- precisely because he sings about everyday activities like playing video games and making out on the couch with your girlfriend and drinking pints with a few rowdy friends. I'm eager (anxious, rather, given how much I've enjoyed his work) to see if he can pull off this next move.

My Favorite Records

"Your favorite music
Well it just makes you sad
But you like it
'Cause you feel special that way."
--Clem Snide

I've been swamped, and so neglecting longer posts. Apologies. But nothing serves as filler like lists, and tonight while at a bar with two friends, the three of us promised to swap our top-20-album opinions by the end of the week. Going through my collection, I had to give myself a break, so I settled on 25. Even that was painful. I can divide those I left off into five categories:

1. Some of my favorites (and all-time greats) who have a body of work I love more than any single effort: The Beatles, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Lyle Lovett, Everything But the Girl, Low, Prince, Morrissey/The Smiths.

2. Great one-off albums by those who are otherwise uneven or forgettable, like Something to Write Home About by The Get Up Kids, 100 Broken Windows by Idlewild, Music for the Morning After by Pete Yorn, or New Miserable Experience by the Gin Blossoms.

3. Relative newcomers who I've listened to a ton over the last year or two, but who need a bit more time to be considered, like Mindy Smith, The Postal Service and Ray Lamontagne (the most likely to eventually make the list). Conversely, oldies-but-goodies from my high school and college years who have been considered for a bit too long to be judged accurately, like the self-titled debut by School of Fish, Are You Driving Me Crazy? by Seam, or Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub.

4. Classics that deserve mention, like Blood on the Tracks by Dylan, OK Computer by Radiohead, or anything else by REM before 1993 (it took a lot of willpower to limit myself to four by them).

5. Then there are the records that could easily have made the list if I made it on a different day (or after one less -- or more -- drink) -- meaning, the most arbitrary of those left off, like When the Pawn by Fiona Apple, The Sunset Tree by The Mountain Goats, The Moon My Saddle by Chamberlain, Since by Richard Buckner, Redo the Stacks by Centro-matic, Rumours by Fleetwod Mac, or The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion by The Black Crowes, a great record by a band that otherwise occupies a lukewarm place in my heart (at best).

On to the list, after two more caveats: First, yes, there are only four works on display here that were released before 1991. Unlike many of my friends, who had older siblings (sometimes significantly older) who were schooling them in the classics of rock, I had (and have) a very lovely older sister whose taste ran more towards classical music from the day she was born. (In short, she's smarter than I am.) Her idea of cutting-edge modern music, even in college, was the Indigo Girls, Tracy Chapman, and Billy Joel. Listen, I still own (and unashamedly enjoy) music by all three of those named, but I think you see my point. I was deep into my junior year of high school before I started to form what would become my own distinct taste. ("Distinct" here defined as "shared by millions of other teenagers who watched 120 Minutes every Sunday night.") And while I've come to love The Beatles and the Stones, and respect a lot of other fogeys, they just didn't reach me when they needed to. Bands are like girls (or boys, if you prefer) -- the ones that get to you first change you the most. Or, to quote a great line from Life of Pi by Yann Martel, "first wonder goes deepest; wonder after that fits in the impression made by the first."

Secondly, I stress the obvious fact that subjectivity has been embraced. There was a discussion about #3 at the bar tonight, for instance, during which I admitted it's a flawed choice under a microscope. But it's also the initial domino that fell 15 years ago and led, pretty directly, to the 5,000 or so songs I'm choosing between as a soundtrack while I write this. So, as ever in these pursuits, objectivity be damned!

OK, sorry, but thirdly, a bonus (of what, I'm not sure) to whoever comes closest to accurately predicting "Dezmond's" eventual total word count in his replies to this post. My guess is 5,820.

25. It’s a Shame About Ray -- The Lemonheads
24. Fables of the Reconstruction -- REM
23. Into the Music -- Van Morrison
22. Siamese Dream -- Smashing Pumpkins
21. Original Pirate Material -- The Streets
20. Strangers Almanac -- Whiskeytown
19. Cake -- Trash Can Sinatras
18. Ben Folds Five -- Ben Folds Five
17. The Joshua Tree -- U2
16. Big Red Letter Day -- Buffalo Tom
15. Girlfriend -- Matthew Sweet
14. Where It Goes -- Lori Carson
13. Still Feel Gone -- Uncle Tupelo
12. August & Everything After -- Counting Crows
11. Murmur -- REM
10. A Century Ends -- David Gray
9. Bloomed -- Richard Buckner
8. Glow -- The Innocence Mission
7. Achtung Baby -- U2
6. Perfect From Now On -- Built to Spill
5. Our Time in Eden -- 10,000 Maniacs
4. Trace -- Son Volt
3. Out of Time -- REM
2. The Bends -- Radiohead
1. Automatic for the People -- REM

The Mountain Goats: An Appreciation

(This will be a long post, but forgive me; it’s my 200th, so I’m celebrating with a clearance sale on logorrhea.)

My friend Brad and I once considered the following barroom question: If you were a musician who had to perform for one night drawing on the songbook of only one artist, who would it be? My answer -- and if memory serves, his, as well -- was Paul Simon. I still don’t see a way around him. Between his solo material and his work with Monsieur Garfunkel (if French is the most beautiful language, is there a less French word than Garfunkel?), you’ve got a treasure trove. Consistent yet diverse both melodically and lyrically, a palette of those songs could make anyone look good.

I bring it up because, despite my unchanging answer, I’ve spent the past four or five days unable to stop listening to the Mountain Goats, a band essentially composed of one guy named John Darnielle. (I've had several albums of his for several years, but this recent addiction is a new phenomenon.) And while a more old-fashioned music listener -- either one of my parents, for instance -- could appreciate much of Simon’s work but would run screaming after a couple of songs by Darnielle, he’s probably one of two or three songwriters (with the emphasis on writer) who I would put in Simon’s class.

He can’t sing particularly well, but it’s misleading to stop there. His vocals are raw, without argument, and would be judged immediately -- on several songs in particular -- as unlistenable by anyone with a bias against adenoidal voices. I’ll come back to that, though.

Darnielle’s lyrics are front and center, in many cases barely less so than if he was working as a poet. Since most of his songs -- especially those that came before his last couple of albums, and there were literally hundreds of them -- feature a very simply strummed guitar and the previously described voice-a-mother-and-maybe-a-few-others-could-love, and even those elements are amateurishly captured with antiquated recording equipment, it’s a good thing the lyrics are mostly brilliant.

When he was interviewed by Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) in The Believer last year, Darnielle said:

I feel like there are some people who should be working more baroque forms and there are some people, like me, who are better suited to do something really simplistic. I did have classical training on the piano, and I’d like to think that if I devoted myself to it I could do what Franklin Bruno does. I guess it depends on where your heart is. For me, a three-chord song that comes in, does what it needs to do, throws in some little fill at the end and gets out of Dodge is always going to be what I love best.

Songs like “Family Happiness” -- and yes, he references Tolstoy in the first verse -- are mostly built with the ballast of several writerly styles; the occasional imagistic jab of a poem, the pleasingly detailed miniature of a good short story, and the more casual style of rock lyrics. The second verse of that one:

Long winding Canadian highways,
innumerable evergreens.
Weather forecast on the AM radio
says we'll be expecting highs in the low teens.
When I mouth my silent curses at you,
you can see my breath.
I hope the stars don't even come out tonight.
I hope we both freeze to death.
Look at the person I've turned into, tell me,
how do you like him now?
No standards of any kind, no creeds to disavow
I am right here where you want me
do what you brought me out here for.
You can arm me to the teeth.
You can't make me go to war.

OK, I should’ve mentioned this is one depressing dude. A friend was recently reading Philip Larkin and said it wasn’t helping his mood, which is understandable, and like Larkin, it's possible that Darnielle will only help your mood if: a) you’re so happy that even dour art won’t dent your armor, and might even make you feel that much better by contrast, or b) you’re so dour that dour art is the only kind that's currently consoling. (If I admit that it’s been b. for me the past couple of weeks, can we just move on? I promised myself this blog wouldn’t turn into a full-fledged diary. Thanks.)

Whereas Simon is often expansive in his sentiment, even when dealing with the thwarted hopes of specific people...

So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field.
"Kathy, I'm lost," I said, though I knew she was sleeping.
"I'm empty and aching and I don't know why."
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike:
They've all come to look for America

...Darnielle shows us human relationships that are absolutely claustrophobic:

We may throw the windows open later
But we are not as far west as you suppose we are
Hot wind coming off the water
The sky gone crazy with stars
While we stay here we imagine we're alive

Or this:

I am not going to lose you
We are going to stay married
In this house like a Louisiana graveyard
Where nothing stays buried
On Southwood Plantation Road
Where the dead will walk again
Put on their Sunday best
And go with unsuspecting Christian men
La la la la la

Or this (thanks for indulging me), more outward-looking in its initial observations but no less despairing:

Window facing an ill-kept front yard
Plums on the tree heavy with nectar
Prayers to summon the destroying angel
Moon stuttering in the sky like film stuck in a projector
And you

Those lines are the opening verse to “Tallahassee,” the title track of a concept album about a couple that moves to Florida and essentially drink themselves (or at least their union) to death.

And I suppose this is where I go back to his singing, because all of this sounds so grim, but it’s not. Or not quite. There’s something boyish about Darnielle’s tone, and like most effective singers, regardless of their natural gifts or lack thereof, he knows how to deliver his songs. And amid the long sentences and listed observations, he occasionally nails a minimal, elemental moment, as when he repeats “I’m coming home, I’m coming home” in “Elijah,” or sings “I am losing control of the language again” in “Masher.”

It should be clear at this point that anyone looking for musical tapestry is in the wrong aisle. In that same interview with Handler, Darnielle said of his younger years:

My prog friends thought Lou Reed was a joke. ... They would say “Do you like this because it’s funny that he can’t sing?” and I’d say, “No, that’s not it,” and they’d say, “Well it has to be, there’s no good guitar,” and I said, “It’s different from that.”

Darnielle is different from that, too, and different from Reed while we’re at it. Reed is all cool detachment (even if it’s ironic) in a lot of his best songs, whereas Darnielle is so invested that even his cheekiest material can be moving. That’s clearest in “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” which has a jokey title, and even many jokey lyrics (very casually crafted on the page, but again, delivered well), but somehow you empathize with its characters when you’re done laughing (or, even more impressively, while you’re laughing). I reprint the whole thing here because I think it’s instructive, and because I like taxing your patience in order to test your loyalty:

The best ever death metal band out of Denton
were a couple of guys
who'd been friends since grade school
One was named Cyrus
the other was Jeff
and they practiced twice a week in Jeff's bedroom
The best ever death metal band out of Denton
never settled on a name
but the top three contenders
after weeks of debate
were Satan's Fingers and the Killers and the Hospital Bombers
Jeff and Cyrus believed in their hearts
they were headed for stage lights and lear jets
and fortune and fame
So in script that made prominent use of a pentagram
they stenciled their drumheads and guitars with their names
This is how Cyrus got sent to the school
where they told him he'd never be famous
And this was why Jeff
in the letters he'd write to his friend
helped develop a plan to get even
When you punish a person for dreaming his dream
don't expect him to thank or forgive you
The best ever death metal band out of Denton
will in time both outpace and outlive you
Hail satan
Tonight
Hail satan
Hail, hail

Allegedly, Darnielle actually has a thing for death metal, claiming that he can’t listen too much to people who traffic in his brand of quieter, more literary rock. From the same interview, and it’s the last time I reference it:

HANDLER: You are revered as a sort of cuddly troubadour.
DARNIELLE: I was always hoping people were afraid of me.
HANDLER: I’m not aware of anyone who’s afraid of you.
DARNIELLE: Then I’m not doing my job.

I can’t imagine people are afraid of Cyrus and Jeff either, despite their Columbine-like potential energy, because Darnielle makes them too three-dimensional for that. In The New Yorker last May, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote:

Cyrus and Jeff are familiar Mountain Goats characters, long on bad luck and short on problem-solving skills, and Darnielle, through his poetry, grants them the dignity that eludes them in their lives.

I disagree with this notion in general, and so here as well. Darnielle’s poetry doesn’t grant dignity to his characters, it simply illuminates the dignity already there. (It’s unfair to raise this distinction here, because it deserves further exploration, but I need some sleep and most of you aren’t still reading at this point, anyway.)

In the same piece, Frere-Jones calls Darnielle “America's best non-hip-hop lyricist.”

With all due respect to the great hip-hop lyricists, I really don’t think the qualifier is necessary.