I don't own anything and I would love to hear more.

Cool, I'll put some on a mix for you.

All the songs would have cowbell in them.

OK, I'm in.

I call dibs on "Un Poco Loco".

Can we finish the unusual love songs one first? Or am I standing here with the paddles while Corwood is saying, "Call it." </ER>

Can we finish the unusual love songs one first? Or am I standing here with the paddles while Corwood is saying, "Call it."

Oh, hell. It got stalled with me, because I'm a lazy git.

Okay, I'm going to post my song right now to Buffistarawk. I mean it. Go check in a few minutes.

Go check in a few minutes.

She does not lie. Although I was really hoping it would be a paean to Pete Rose. Or maybe Ken Anderson. There was a quarterback. Nice mustache, too.

Although I was really hoping it would be a paean to Pete Rose. Or maybe Ken Anderson. There was a quarterback. Nice mustache, too.

Ah, all the paeans around town are about Marvin Lewis these days. (Quite possibly deservedly so. We'll see this season.)

And combining two recent thread themes, Robert Christgau's review of 69 Love Songs (note the first line):

69 Love Songs [Merge, 1999]

Accusing Stephin Merritt of insincerity would be like accusing Cecil Taylor of playing too many notes--not only does it go without saying, it's what he's selling. I say if he'd lived all 69 songs himself he'd be dead already, and the only reality I'm sure they attest to is that he's very much alive. I dislike cynicism so much that I'm reluctant ever to link it to creative exuberance. But this cavalcade of witty ditties--one-dimensional by design, intellectual when it feels like it, addicted to cheap rhymes, cheaper tunes, and token arrangements, sung by nonentities whose vocal disabilities keep their fondness for pop theoretical--upends my preconceptions the way high art's sposed to. The worst I can say is that its gender-fucking feels more wholehearted than its genre-fucking. Yet even the "jazz" and "punk" cuts are good for a few laughs--total losers are rare indeed. My favorite song from three teeming individually-purchasable-but-what-fun-would-that-be CDs: "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure," who has the savoir faire to rhyme with "closure," "kosher," and "Dozier" before Merritt murders him. A+

OH MY GOD, THE KNITTERS ROCKED SO HARD.

Yes, I am still sick. But I believe that hearing John Doe and Exene rampage through "The New World" -- with a hell of a solo by Dave Alvin that threw in a couple bars of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" (plus a couple of lines of the Beatles's "Revolution" sung by John for good measure) -- cured me of ailments I didn't even know I had. My God, that was a blisteringly good show. Tina, thank you for the extra nudge to go see it.

This article is interesting:

"The enduring bond between Huey Lewis and the developmentally disabled" [link]

I just finished Joe Jackson's partial auto-biography (he pretty much stops it at the time Look Sharp! was released), A Cure For Gravity. Anyone else read it?

Lovely Sufjan Stevens article in the LA Times. I'm going to post rather than link because it took me 7 bugmenots to get in and I wanted to spare you the aggravation.

**************

The states of his art
By Richard Cromelin, Times Staff Writer

Sufjan Stevens and his six backing musicians are wearing identical green T-shirts emblazoned with the words "Come on Feel the Illinoise" as they play a short set of his songs for a Southern California audience. The question is, why synchronize the wardrobe when they're performing on the radio?

"I think it just helps us to feel kind of unified," Stevens says after the recent performance on KCRW-FM's "Morning Becomes Eclectic" program. "It puts us in the attitude of respect for our audience. I think it's important on every level to have a kind of attitude of unification in some way…. I don't really have that naturally, I'm not a great performer, so we have to do everything we can, do the exercises, to prepare."

Actually, Stevens can be an enthralling performer just standing there singing his songs, but you can see why he'd want some self-help rituals to grease the tracks. At a time when the indie-rock world is serving up such spotlight-savvy figures as Arcade Fire and Bright Eyes to an eager audience, one of the genre's most acclaimed artists this year is a reluctant, road-shy singer-songwriter who's wary of his growing success

Stevens is an odd fit in the freewheeling pop world: a Christian with a Persian name (pronounced "SOOF-yawn," it was bestowed by the leader of the sect his parents belonged to when he was born), an intense, thoughtful manner and a predilection for solitude.

As he talks softly on the eve of a U.S. tour, Stevens, 30, seems more the novelist he originally set out to become than a bandleader who soon will be basking in sellout crowds' adulation on the concert stage. There's a formality and a seriousness in his manner, along with periodic traces of dry humor.

"I think you should be suspicious when there's a lot of interest in what you're doing," the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based musician says firmly, sitting in a small lounge at the Santa Monica radio station. "You should kind of check it at every level. Are they interested in what I'm doing because of my proposition to do the 'states' records, because it's a gimmick? Or are they really interested in my songs and my music?

"I think we should all be measured by our work and not measured by our propositions and not measured by our advertising. 'Cause there's a huge discrepancy between what's advertised and what's being sold, what's being created.

"It does seem like there's a little more interest now. I'm really honored. But I wonder if a lot of it is ultimately very distracting to a person's work and privacy. So I'm a little worried about that — though I know I don't have to worry about these things in the way, I don't know, that Cher has to worry about it."

Of course Cher never promised that she'd record an album about each of the American states, as Stevens did after his 2003 album "Michigan" began to get some notice. It was meant as an attention-getting gimmick, but the idea caught his imagination, and now it's taking him to parts unknown.

While "Michigan" revealed its unifying theme to Stevens only after he had assembled some diverse songs he'd been working on for a couple of years, the more ambitious "Illinois" was conceived from the start to fit the concept.

The product of extensive research and painstaking methodology, it has a musical palette that sweeps from the brassy bravado of stage musicals to solo folk outings of austere intimacy. Its subjects range from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago to Superman to Abraham Lincoln to the ghost of Carl Sandburg to serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

These historical and fictional figures are balanced by personal episodes from Stevens' own experience, such as "Casimir Pulaski Day," a wrenching account of a (continued...)