I got an entire set (okay, a two-song set) dedicated to me by My Favorite DJ™. I’m sure the fact that I had just made a pledge in KDHX’s pledge drive had nothing to do with it…Nah, the set consisted of songs by two artists that John knows I love: “Everybody Come Down” by the Delgados and “Lying,” the song that made me a Sam Phillips fan. Literally. It was one of those rare times that reading about an artist and a song made me go out and buy the record without having heard a single note. I read some article that talked about Sam’s spirituality, her search for truth and meaning, and it quoted “Lying” at some length, noting that it was written partly in response to Sinead O’Connor’s “I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got.” Sam’s answer is: “If I said I don’t want what I don’t have/And all the answers are in love/If I said I believe in myself/And that’s enough/I’d be lying.” Made sense to me.

And the set reminded me that I’ve been meaning to ruminate about the Female Vocalist Question. I’m guessing that I have about twice as many female vocalists on my iPod as anyone I know, and I’m forever intrigued by the “issues” people have with female singers. I’m as hard on the ones I don’t like, as hypercritical of them, as anyone—the baby-voiced ones, and even more, the thin-voiced ones, the girls who really can’t sing much at all but do so anyway. (Bananarama are my canonical example of this—their three thin little voices combined didn’t even add up to one decent voice—but there are plenty of others.) And that makes me wonder about the sort of built-in sexism of our attitude toward female vocalists; they seem to be judged so much more harshly than male singers, and we have much higher standards for them than we do for men. Or so it seems to me. I have friends, both male and female, who make blanket statements like “I don’t really like female singers,” as though they all sounded the same. Or maybe as though the listeners assume that all female singers will be grating somehow.

And I do it too, I know I’m a much harsher critic of female singers than of males, and much more particular about the ones I think are great. In my case, I think that’s because female singers matter more to me, so I want them to be good. There are heaps and piles of male singers who are just fine but don’t blow up my skirt in any particular way; I’d maybe even say that the majority of male singers that I hear strike me that way. I’m also noticing a growing trend toward annoying/quirky/whiny male vocalists (Conor Oberst, the Decembrists’ singer, others), so maybe my criticisms of guy singers will begin to match the ones of female singers. A great male singer, of course, can make me melt into a little puddle, but there are relatively few of those (hardly any rock ones, either—more soul and country singers, and Nick Drake)…and even the ones I love best don’t quite affect me the way my favorite female vocalists do. There are also relatively few female vocalists in my pantheon of the truly brilliant, I guess, but those who are there are practically like goddesses to me: lots of the Celtic singers I’ve mentioned here before, of course, and needless to say, Sandy Denny, the queen of all vocalists ever, and Lori Carson, and Emma Pollock from the Delgados, and the magnificent Patty Loveless, and Sharon Jones, and even Carol Van Dijk, who’s not a conventionally great singer but makes her voice work. And the Boone/Kelly sisters from the Damnations, and of course Sam, and…lots of ‘em, anyway.

Not sure exactly what my point is here, really; it’s just something I think about a lot. It bugs me that so many people are inherently hostile to female singers, and it bugs me even more when I’m guilty of thinking that way myself.

…for me to finally at least start telling my Replacements stories. Why? Well, an e-mail from my friend Missy kind of reminded me, for one thing, and Westerberg’s been touring (I missed his appearance here only because I was out of town—no way would I have missed him otherwise, despite my relative lack of enthusiasm for his solo work), and my dear friend Peter, the band’s discoverer and long-ago manager/mentor, has been much in my thoughts lately, because he had a birthday a month ago and because it’s been bugging me that I haven’t written him in well over a year. And mostly because I can point to several bands who changed my life in vague, difficult to describe emotional and aesthetic ways, but I can really only point to two or maybe three who changed my life in literal, material ways: Uncle Tupelo, maybe the Jam, and probably most of all, the Replacements.

(But first, a preliminary Reason to Be Cheerful for the day: 2.5 minutes into the second half, it’s Gophers 40, Indiana 33 in the second round of the Big Ten championship. I think my Gophs are officially off the bubble now, but I’m not sure the selection committee agrees with me; a loss to Indiana wouldn’t completely ruin their tournament hopes, but a win would pretty well cement them.)

The stories are going to take me a while, though. So I’ll start with some prehistory: For most of my college years, my best friend was Martha, previously mentioned in this here blog. Martha was from Minneapolis (okay, actually Hopkins, an upper-middle-class-ish close-in suburb), and her then longtime boyfriend was a guy named Sprague, who was something of a minor figure in the Mpls. music scene. He was in one version of the twangabilly band Safety Last, which also featured, at various times, Gary Louris, later of some lameass alt-country band, and the extraordinarily talented and underrated singer/songwriter Lianne Smith. Sprague was also a recording studio guy, and went on to do some studio work as well as guitar playing for various minor luminaries. (He was also a complete jerk, as I recall from my occasional encounters with him, and he treated Martha appallingly, but I guess lots of 21-year-old guys are jerks…not to mention lots of 19-year-old girls, I guess.) So Martha was up on all the Minneapolis bands, and sometime in early 1982, she told me about the Replacements, sang snippets of “I’m in Trouble” to me, and finally played me “Sorry, Ma.” I became a fan right away, though I only saw them once in my remaining years in NYC–a show at CBGB that was good but wasn’t spectacular in either of the ways that the Mats could be spectacular.

(Gophers 51, Indiana 42, 11:20 to go. And the Gophers are already in the bonus. I am guardedly optimistic.)

So that’s the prehistory. I didn’t know about them as early on as a Minneapolitan (or even someone from elsewhere in the Midwest) would have, but I knew about them and knew I liked them pretty early in their history.

Flash forward to 1984. I moved to Austin for my first attempt at grad school. Saw the Replacements one drunken evening at the Continental Club in late ’84, I guess. They were pretty rowdy and sloppy, but not out-of-control sloppy, so it was the best way to see them…but I was really drunk, so it wasn’t quite as memorable an experience as it might have been. Slight fast-forward again to February 1985. I had just been dumped by a guy I didn’t even really like all that much, with whom I had had a pretty unsatisfying relationship (he had a great body, not so much on the personality…and he was kind of a pothead, though he never smoked around me because I was so disdainful of it). True to form, though, I waited for him to dump me rather than dumping him when I had the chance. And even truer to form, I fell into mild heartbreak/obsessiveness after the breakup, out of habit rather than any actual feelings for the guy. (In a rare burst of insight, I actually recognized that my reaction to the breakup was way out of proportion to anything I’d felt during the relationship, and started seeing a therapist to help me break that pattern–which I did, almost permanently.) But even if the heartbreak was self-inflicted rather than sincere, it felt like heartbreak, and for those first few weeks afterward, I felt like raging hell.

(Gophers 60, Indiana 46, 8:00 left. I never underestimate the ability of any team from Minnesota to snatch defeat from the jaws of certain victory, but this is starting to look pretty good.)

And that was my frame of mind when my roommate Bill (not my now-husband Bill, but a friend since college days who I still refer to as “my other Bill”) brought home the 12″ single of “I Will Dare” b/w “20th Century Boy” and “Hey Good Lookin’.” He brought it home, then went out with his girlfriend for the evening, and I threw the record on the stereo. For some combination of reasons known only to the cosmos, it just…hit me. That’s the only way I can think of to put it. It hit me the way the first days after you’ve fallen in love with someone hit you, the way seeing King’s College Chapel at Cambridge hit me the first time I was there, the way a big ol’ Austin sunset can hit you when it isn’t too hot to be outdoors yet. I’d say the song “resonated” with me, but there’s no way that verb is anywhere near adequate. It hit me right in the solar plexus, not to mention the head and heart. And when it was over, I picked up the tone arm and put it on again…and again…and so on. I must have listened to it 25 times in a row that night, pausing only once or twice to check out the b-sides. Fifteen or so listens in, I knew all the lyrics (or thought I did—there’s a line in there that everyone always gets wrong, and I didn’t find out for sure what it was until later in this story) and was singing, shouting, sobbing along. Twenty (!) years later, I can still remember exactly how I felt that night…and “I Will Dare” remains (if I’m forced to choose) my favorite song of all time.

(Gophers 71, Indiana 52, 2:00 to go. I’d say that I don’t think even the Gophers can blow this one, but I’m afraid I’d jinx them. And stranger things have happened. I once saw then-Gopher Sam Jacobson—a guy who really should have had at least a little bit of an NBA career—score 12 points in 90 seconds to give the Gophs a come-from-behind win.)

I was grad-student poor in those days, so I couldn’t go out the next day and buy the entire Replacements catalog, but I did buy Let It Be, the album from which “I Will Dare” comes, as soon as I could find it, and gradually, over the next few weeks, I bought all the rest, too. Fanaticism ensued. I went to the giant Perry-Castaneda Library at UT and scoured their periodicals collection looking for articles about the band, which were surprisingly few and far between back then. I did find a short profile in Musician magazine, with a publicity photo in which Paul looked really cute…which he actually kinda wasn’t in those days, as I was soon to find out. Not that it mattered; I was already in love with him, so what he looked like wasn’t strictly relevant.

(And the final: Gophers 71, Indiana 55. That noise you just heard was a giant sigh of relief emanating not only from me but from a significant portion of the population of Minnesota.)

Yeah, okay, I wasn’t in love with him, I was in love with his songwriting. It’s an important distinction, sure. There are songwriters I love who I suspect aren’t tremendously nice people. But—going out on a bit of a limb here—in a way, it’s different for girls. I wouldn’t say that I never had a favorite band without having a crush on one of the guys in it, because that wouldn’t be true at all. (After all, I spent a good part of the early ’90s listening to almost nothing but American Music Club, and God knows I never had a crush on Mark friggin’ Eitzel, to say the least.) But I also can’t deny that crushing on a band member has often been a component of my fandom for any given band, at least the ones with boys in them. (And sometimes even ones without boys in them, though that’s a totally different type of crush.) It’s pretty much just the cult of personality, really. And though some of the women I know would deny it with their last breath, most of the women I know who are serious music fans (and that used to be a really small number; more on that sometime) also get crushes on boys in the band. It doesn’t diminish the sincerity or informedness of their fandom, I’m not suggesting that in the least. It’s just a component of the fandom. Now that a) I’m old and married and b) often don’t pay as much attention to the individuals in bands as I used to, partly because CDs, with their smaller photos, and the iPod have contributed to my not gleaning as much information about bands as I did in the past unless it’s a band I’m really passionate about (I can tell you the names of all of the Delgados band members, for sure, and Dolorean too). And c) it’s harder to have crushes on guys in bands these days because they’re often literally 20 years younger than me, and I just don’t get crushes on anyone who was born when I was, like, in high school.

But I digress. And it’s time to wrap up for the day anyway. The next installment will begin with the day Tim was released: October 14, 1985.

I haven’t written about music much lately, which probably means that my readership has dwindled from four to one or two…

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that every time I think about what I want to say in my epic Celtic/British Isles Traditional Music and Me, I’m nowhere near a computer. The other is that I haven’t bought much lately, trying to stay true to my plan not to acquire too many CDs per month. I broke down today, though, because the new Delgados’ single, “Girls of Valour,” with a cover of Ewan MacColl’s magnificent “Ballad of Accounting” on the b-side, is available, and I had to have that. Then while I was ordering that, I figured I might as well shell out for the live CD they’re selling only on their site, despite the horrible exchange rate. (There are two iTunes-exclusive EPs at the iTunes Music Store too…but I haven’t bought those. Yet.) And then, because the LynxPod has been playing Kate Rusby at least twice a day lately, I decided to pick up one of her early CDs, Sleepless. It was cheaper new at my favorite online retailer than it was used at Half.com or Amazon, happily.

So I went a little wild, but hey, I hadn’t bought a single CD in at least three weeks! (Instead, I indulged myself by finding old but mint copies of two favorite books from my childhood: The Witch’s Daughter by well-known children’s (and adult) author Nina Bawden, a wonderful, slightly magical, and ultimately sad story set in the Outer Hebrides, and a much more obscure book, We Danced in Bloomsbury Square, by a prolific British writer whose real name was Mabel Esther Allan but who wrote this book and a few others under the more exotic name Jean Estoril. It’s about twin sisters from Birkenhead (across the Mersey from Liverpool) who get scholarships to a prestigious ballet school in London; the beautiful blonde twin is a first choice for the scholarship, while the dark-haired, brooding twin, who narrates, has to squeak in as an alternate. I usually tend to think that my love affair with that part of the world began when my parents sent me to acting camp in England the summer I turned 14 (in lieu of the much more expensive summer experience that I really wanted–a trip to study French intensively by living with a French family through a program called the Experiment in International Living), but when I think back, I guess it started much earlier, with the children’s and young adult books set in England that I devoured whenever I could. I remember that We Danced in Bloomsbury Square was one that my dad picked up from the review slush pile at the magazine where he worked; the used copy I picked up on Amazon has the same cover, and when I took it out of the package, I got chills. “There is no frigate like a book/To take us lands away,” indeed. (And unfortunately, that poem, which I used to love, is one of the many Emily Dickinson poems that you can sing to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” I’ll never forgive the person who taught me that trick…)

Fortunately, I’m not aware of anything on the immediate CD release horizon that I absolutely have to buy…but I’d be happy to be disabused of that notion, so if you’re reading this, tell me what you’re listening to now and what you’re looking forward to among new releases. I want to know.

I’m sure the Delgados stuff is going to take a few weeks to arrive, but I’m just speechless with excitement about hearing them do “Ballad of Accounting.” British folk legend Dick Gaughan first made it well-known, I guess, but I know it first and foremost from Songlines, the first solo album by the magnificent Karan Casey, former lead singer of Solas. Karan, who will figure prominently in the forthcoming epic referred to above, loves a good political/class struggle song—that album also features her wonderful a capella cover, with John Doyle duetting, of UK politico-folkie Leon Rosselson’s brilliant “The World Turned Upside Down,” about the Diggers, which is a story so remarkable that I’ll save it for another day, or you could just read about it yourself. But back to “Ballad of Accounting”: with, or perhaps in spite of, her impossibly light but never ethereal classically-trained soprano, she manages to capture all the bite and rage of the song. The accounting referred to in the title is not the kind that CPAs do, of course, but rather the idea of accounting for a life: “Did you alter the face of the city?/Make any change in the world you found?” and “Did you ever demand any answers?/
The who and the what and the reason why?” and…oh, I’ll just post the full lyric:

“Ballad of Accounting” by Ewan MacColl

In the morning we built the city
In the afternoon walked through its streets
Evening saw us leaving
We wandered through our days as if they would never end
All of us imagined we had endless time to spend
We hardly saw the crossroads and small attention gave
To landmarks on the journey from the cradle to the grave

Did you learn to dream in the morning?
Abandon dreams in the afternoon?
Wait without hope in the evening?
Did you stand there in the traces and let them feed you lies?
Did you trail along behind them wearing blinkers on your eyes?
Did you kiss the foot that kicked you? Did you thank them for their scorn?
Did you ask for their forgiveness for the act of being born?

Did you alter the face of the city?
Did you make any change in the world you found?
Or did you observe all the warnings?
Did you read the trespass notices, did you keep off the grass?
Did you shuffle off the pavement just to let your betters pass?
Did you learn to keep your mouth shut, were you seen and never heard?
Did you learn to be obedient and jump to at a word?

Did you ever demand any answers?
The who and the what and the reason why?
Did you ever question the setup?
Did you stand aside and let them choose while you took second best?
Did you let them skim the cream off and then give to you the rest?
Did you settle for the shoddy? Did you think it right
To let them rob you right and left and never make a fight?

What did you learn in the morning?
How much did you know in the afternoon?
Were you content in the evening?
Did they teach you how to question when you were at the school?
Did the factory help you grow, were you the maker or the tool?
Did the place where you were living enrich your life and then
Did you reach some understanding of all your fellow men?

Pretty great stuff, no? I can’t wait to hear the Delgados do it.

Since only four or five people ever read this blog, I figure it’s safe to post this now. Of course, those four or five people probably know about it already:

In an effort to declutter my life just a little, and, I hope, to share some music with people who will appreciate it more than my dusty, overcrowded shelves do, I’m giving away a bunch of CDs. Not trading or selling, but giving away, in exchange for either blank CD-Rs or postage. The first batch is listed here. (There’s a more long-winded explanation, along with details of how the whole thing works, on the page with the list itself.)

If you stumble across this post and want to tell other people, please feel free to do so. I’m hoping (I never say “planning,” ’cause that guarantees that it won’t happen) to add a bunch more CDs this weekend.

I’m listening to my favorite radio show in the world at the moment, and my favorite DJ is playing “One Step Up,” from Tunnel of Love, the only Bruce Springsteen album that I can claim to love unequivocally.* The show has been great from beginning to end today. Listening to it cost me money (had to order the new Bettie Serveert record after John played a song from it, and somewhat to my surprise, I ordered the new one by Low, a band I’d always dismissed becauase I hated–and in this case, that’s not too strong a word–their first album and the live show I saw around that time. But a guy on one of the music lists I’m no longer on persuaded me to listen to a couple of tracks from an advance he had, and I liked them quite well. Then John played a song from the just-released record this morning; I’d been away from my desk, and came back in the middle of the song, and liked it so much that I checked his playlist right away to see what it was. When it turned out to be Low, I decided to take a chance on the record, even though I’m trying not to buy records unless I’m either already familiar with them or close to certain that I’ll love them–all part of the effort to buy fewer CDs.

Anyway, in spite of the fact that it cost me money, I loved today’s show, like every other week’s show, and it occurred to me that though I try to mention the show as often as I can when I post to various lists (which isn’t a very effective tactic right now since I’m under a self-imposed moratorium on e-mail list reading or posting–more on that later, I think), I still don’t mention it often enough.

So here’s a plug for it: Memphis to Manchester, on KDHX, Thursday mornings from 8 to 10 a.m. That first link will take you to a brief description of the page and the most recent playlist; you can also look at archived playlists. As you’ll see, it mixes soul, indie rock, twang, and related music for people with wide-ranging tastes. KDHX is a fine community station in St. Louis, but they stream live, so you can listen wherever you are if you’re near a computer at that early hour. I listen to various excellent Net radio broadcasts, from the BBC to KEXP, but this is by far my favorite show, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Put it on your calendar and listen to it every Thursday if you possibly can.

And that’s today’s plug.

*I still love Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, but even now, nearly 26 years after I graduated from high school, there’s weird high-school-era baggage attached to those records, because there were so many Bruce–make that BROOOOOCE–obsessives in my high school, people who really thought they were Bruce Springsteen, pretty much, and overexposure to Bruce via those people and via NYC radio made it impossible for me to listen to him at all for many years. That’s meant that there are albums of his that I just don’t know very well, along with a few that I know well enough to know that I don’t love them–though I guess every record he’s ever made features at least one song that I think is great.

This is an attempt to reconstruct another of the posts that vanished into the ether when my blog temporarily went walkies a few weeks ago…except I’m not sure how I started that one off, so I’ll just dive clumsily into this one:

The question in the title of this post refers to the Damnations, who were once an exceptionally fine band based in Austin, TX, and seemed to have a great future ahead. What prompted me to ask the rhetorical question was having “For Awhile,” one of the songs on their superb first album, Half Mad Moon, come up on the iPod.* I hadn’t listened to the record** in a long time, and that wistful, simple song reminded me of everything that was great about the band: Rob Bernard’s flashy-but-not-too-flashy guitar playing, the sweet harmonies of sisters Amy Boone and Deborah Kelly, and maybe more than anything, Amy’s incredible songwriting. I admire lots of female songwriters, from Lori Carson to Sam Phillips to countless more, but Amy Boone had a way with lyrics that was unlike any other woman songwriter I’ve ever encountered (and not like a whole lot of males either, come to think of it). That was what put me in total awe of her, so much so that when they played Twangfest 3, way back in 1999, and hung out with the rest of us at the motel after the show, I was too awestruck to go up and talk to her. And that’s saying a lot, because I’ve conquered awe sufficiently to talk to nearly every musician I’ve ever really wanted to, even the supposedly unapproachable Jay Farrar (who was perfectly approachable and talkative when I met him, but we had some friends in common, which probably helped). I can’t really think of any other musicians who could even potentially have that effect on me, except maybe Iris DeMent and the aforementioned Sam. With Amy Boone, I’d either have been completely speechless or made a Chris-Farley-style fool of myself.

I’m not sure exactly why. But she could write a song like “Kansas,” which was historical (and historically accurate), odd, not exactly standard girly-love-song fare (not that I’m suggesting that that’s all most female songwriters can write, of course–just that it’s a very unexpected topic and one that shouldn’t make a great song, but somehow does) and catchy as hell, and then write “Spit and Tears,” arguably the best song ever written about a dog, and then turn around and–all on the same record–write “For Awhile,” which is simple but absolutely heartbreaking:

For a while, right away
Before true confessions
The weather’s always better on common ground
Until cloudy waters rise and you lose that ground
And you start falling
Calling it love
Calling it love

Finally touch down
A whole ocean shattered like glass
We drank that potion so fast and turned
Wanting more when we’re doing the same
Falling
Calling it love
Calling it love
What do you mean by “falling”?

Ain’t no use in hanging around
Emptiness swallows its own path
I watch my weakness go down easy
And I pray it won’t last
Fallling
Calling it love
Calling it love
Mm, love
Where do you see yourself falling?

It’s a song that’s both obliquely specific and transparently universal. That probably doesn’t come across just from transcribing the lyrics (I think any lyric can be made to look stupid or brilliant without musical context), but when I listen to it, I can’t help thinking that anyone who’s ever been in love or lost in love will know exactly what she means. To be able to capture that and also write about John Brown and “Bleeding Kansas,” among other topics…that’s a lot of talent, not to mention that she’s a terrific singer (as is her sister) and an excellent bass player.

But I got that record in 1998 (the official release was early 1999). That’s seven years ago. Since then, the band was dropped by their major label (to no one’s surprise), released one decidedly less impressive follow-up, played Twangfest again (I dealt with Deborah for most of the booking details, and wasn’t too awestruck to talk to her–just her sister), and mostly stayed around Austin and played lots of shows at the Continental Club and the like. (If you check their Website, it’s up-to-date, but there’s one “tour” date listed: the Continental Club, last Friday.) And I can’t help wondering if they got fed up with trying to be a touring band, or if the Austin slacker disease–you know, “yeah, we make some money playing local shows, and our day jobs help pay the rent, and we’re content with that”–got to them as it has to so many other bands…or what. If they are content to be just sort of a local band, in a town where there are lots of bands in the same position, that’s their choice, of course, and best wishes to them. (I mean that sincerely, not sarcastically; it’s a mug’s game at best, trying to be a successful or even subsistence-level band, and I can’t fault anyone who decides they don’t want to play along.) But I can’t help but wonder, and feel saddened at the thought of all that talent floating around out there and not reaching my ears or the ears of the, I dunno, hundreds? of other people who, for a while at least, felt the way I did about them.

(There’s eventually going to be a vol. 2 of “What the Hell Happened?”, about the great Cheri Knight, except that I actually know what happened to her, pretty much; I just have trouble accepting the fact that a record I still listen to constantly–her second album, The Northeast Kingdom–came out seven friggin’ years ago and will probably never be followed up. But that’s a story for another day.)

*The iPod has a name now, in keeping with the overall theme of my domain name: it’s the LynxPod, and will hereafter be referred to as such. I don’t always name my inanimate objects–cars usually, guitars sometimes, bicycles always, mandolins never, and everything else rarely–but I talk about this particular inanimate object so much that it seemed to warrant naming.

**For the sake of accuracy and the love of nitpickery, I should note that the version of the album that I put on the LynxPod is an advance that predated the official release by six months or more. The commercially released version was remastered and slightly resequenced, and one or two of the songs were completely re-recorded (two, if I remember correctly: the title track and “Unholy Train,” but I could be wrong since my memory is just a giant sieve). It’s hard for me to listen to it objectively because I was so used to the advance, but being as objective as I can, I think the commercial version is inferior to the advance…but it’s still a great record.

In reconstructing my blog after its brief foray into the Twilight Zone of the blogosphere, I noticed that a few posts went walkies somewhere along the line. Because I’m the only person who actually reads this blog and I can’t bear the thought of those posts out there in Blogovian limbo, I’m going to attempt to reconstruct the ones I can remember. Here’s the first of them, not verbatim (it would be a little scary if it were verbatim, now that I think of it):

At the end of 2004, my husband decided to compile a list of people’s favorites of the decade-so-far on a music e-mail list that we were then both on (I have subsequently left in a huff, or maybe it was an hour and a huff, or perhaps a taxi). I threw my list together quickly, shortly after his initial request to the list, because I knew that otherwise I would spend weeks agonizing over it; this way, I spent only a few hours agonizing over it. I think if I put the list together again right now, it might be slightly different, but again wanting to avoid those days of agony, I’m going to post my original list:

I had a really hard time limiting this to ten, but this is what I came up with. Subject to revision numerous times, starting ten seconds after I post:

1. Dolly Varden, The Dumbest Magnets
2. Allison Moorer, The Hardest Part
3. Robbie Fulks, Couples in Trouble
4. Scott Miller, Thus Always to Tyrants
5. Sam Phillips, Fan Dance
6. The Libertines, Up the Bracket
7. Scott Miller, Are You with Me?
8. Dixie Chicks, Home
9. The Delgados, Universal Audio
10. Jay Farrar, The Slaughter Rule soundtrack (my edited version)*

I posted my ten shortly after there had been a discussion on the list about whether or not there was a valid difference between “best” and “favorite.” My feeling is that there definitely is, and the above list confirms that. I don’t know if I can seriously, rationally argue, for example, that Dolly Varden’s The Dumbest Magnets is objectively the best record released since January 1, 2000, but I can state pretty unequivocally that it’s my favorite, in the sense that it’s the record that’s meant the most to me; although I’m capable of evaluating it objectively as a superb (if imperfect) record, my feelings about it, for various reasons, transcend any objective measures and move int the purely passion-based. Objectively, I think The Hardest Part–like The Dumbest Magnets, probably a once-in-a-lifetime peak of brilliance by an artist who is nonetheless capable of creating many more great records–might be a better record, but The Dumbest Magnets is still my favorite.

*I might eventually–in the unlikely event that I find myself with lots of spare time or the more likely event that I find myself wanting to duck schoolwork or work-work–write a little mini-essay on each of the records, because doing so would give me great pleasure, and I don’t really have any other forums to write about music much at the moment, now that I’m not actually subbed to any purely music-related lists. For the moment, though, I’ll just note that my special customized edition of the Slaughter Rule soundtrack is the regular version minus the Freakwater song and the Vic Chesnutt song. I’m not a Freakwater fan in general, but the torture they inflict on “When I Stop Dreaming” should be a prosecutable offense. I’m not exactly a Vic Chesnutt fan either–more of an admirer, a picker-and-chooser from his catalog than a real fan–but I like a lot of what he does, and his dirgelike, barely audible version of “Rank Stranger” was a big disappointment to me, so I left it off my version of the record. Those are two pretty much canonical songs that really should be treated with more respect, IMO. I’m pretty open-minded when it comes to covers: there are note-for-note faithful covers that I love, and there are complete reinventions of songs that I love, and I’m not a purist either way. But I do balk at outright desecration of great songs, and that’s how those two strike me.

Okay, end of rant; this is supposed to be a list of my favorites, after all, and absent those two songs, the Slaughter Rule soundtrack is a magnificent work. I say that as someone who would not have expected to put an almost all instrumental record on any best-of list, much less a (mostly) Jay Farrar record, since of all the many things I love about Jay Farrar, his voice is probably first and foremost. But it’s a gorgeous, atmospheric, imaginative work that does something many soundtracks can’t: it actually makes the movie better.

Having said all that, I’m not positive that if I redid the list right now, I wouldn’t swap out Terroir Blues, Jay’s most recent record (with vocals!), for the Slaughter Rule soundtrack; every time I hear that record, I like it better, and if I compile a list like this again in a year or two, I won’t be surprised to find Terroir Blues on it. But this was the one I came up with initially, so here it is, with no apologies–it’s not like there are any records on it that I’m not proud to have there.

In reconstructing the damn blog, I re-read my Dolorean post and decided that further listening (lots and lots of further listening) to Violence in the Snowy Fields indicated that my initial assessment of the lyrics missed the mark some. The Christian imagery in the lyrics, in particular, eluded me at first, I think. I know there are some who prefer the more elliptical and cryptic lyrics of the first-actually-second record, Not Exotic, and I’m not knocking those at all, but the lyrics as well as the melodies on Violence are something else entirely.

It ended up very close to being my favorite record of the year, though in the end I just couldn’t give the nod to anyone but the Delgados. Regardless, I think it’s an astonishing achievement, and I’ll have more to say about them soon.

Let’s see…I first saw the Jam in 1978? in the waning days of the CBGB Theatre, which was CB’s attempt at a bigger and slightly more upscale venue. They were loud, intense, and a little aloof from the crowd; I think they just didn’t know how a US crowd would respond to them, so, a little defensively, they decided not to interact too much. I wasn’t a huge Jam fan at that point (though it wasn’t long till I became one), so the show didn’t change my life or anything.

Forward to 1981. One of the greatest years of my life for various reasons. I was by then so much of a Jam fan that I was actually thinking about starting a US version of their fan club, something I would ordinarily have been way too hip to do. In the process of finding out about that, I met these two women–one of them went on to become Julian Cope’s second wife–who were legendary Jam fans, American girls who’d followed the Jam on numerous UK tours. Not groupies, just fans, I hasten to add. Dorian and Patty. After a UK trip when they thought the band had treated them unfairly (a very long story, which I won’t go into here, but they weren’t unjustified in feeling slighted), they sent a letter to The Face complaining about the experience. They weren’t giving up on the Jam, but they felt they were owed an explanation. They got hate mail, they got phone calls supporting them, they got snarky comments from John Weller, Paul’s dad and the band’s manager. In the meantime, I sort of befriended them and gave them a sympathetic ear…and found myself standing between them and Paul as they bickered and yelled at each other during soundcheck at the Jam’s show at the Ritz, 5/81. I ended up talking to Paul about it for a while after Dorian and Patty had left; he was genuinely upset about it. That was my meeting Paul experience. I told him I was planning to go see them in Guildford in July, and he said that if I could track him down at the show, he’d make sure I got in, got backstage passes, etc. He was entirely gentlemanly. I was over the moon.

I think being rattled by the experience made him play even better that night. The Ritz was unpleasantly overcrowded, I got stuck in front of The Guy Who Screams Along to the Songs as Loud as He Can, and I just generally didn’t like the Ritz. But it was still a great show, nearly letter-perfect but also incredibly high energy. Paul was funny, bantering about how some Jam songs just don’t translate easily to the US. Bruce was polite and appreciative. Rick played the hell out of the drums. I went home a very happy girl.

Two months later, spending the summer in London, I took the train down to Guildford by myself because Marina, my best friend and traveling companion, didn’t want to go. Met two guys (one of whom grew up to be a fairly well-known art photographer, but that’s another story) and hung out drinking halves with them while we waited to see if we’d be allowed in to soundcheck. There must have been 50 or 60 guys all decked out in Fred Perry and Sta-Prest…and me. I met Tony Parker of the immortal fanzine Jammin’ and bought a copy of the zine. I got pleasantly buzzed on bitter. Finally we got in, on the condition that we would have to build the barrier that would keep us from standing right up in front of the stage. As a result, we got to hear our own little half-hour Jam set, played for just the 50 or 60 of us. Amazing.

The show was amazing too, with the Fred-Perry-wearers starting their chant for “Down in the Tube Station” about two-thirds of the way into the set. It was the last encore, and it was awe-inspiring in spite of the band’s apparent lack of complete enthusiasm for playing it. They played long sets, too, blistering through much of their catalog in the two hours plus that they played.

And then racing to make the last train back to London with my new friends, Chris and Nick. Stopping for chips from the chip shop and having two or three guys who’d been at the show come running up to us, breathless, saying, “There’s a whole group of skins coming along to beat up some mods on the way to the train, you’d better get to the train station before they catch you.” I was 19, I was completely in love with anything mod, anything to do with working-class English culture, really, and to have to run like hell to escape the skinheads made me feel like I belonged, in some weird way. I could have floated back to London on my blissfulness. Instead I rode back with Chris and Nick, made plans to meet them the next night, half in love with Chris already. Quite a night.

The next night was more of the same, except that Marina came along, and we weren’t pressed into service building a barrier, just got to hang out on the lawn near the club till they let us in at soundcheck. After soundcheck, Bruce and Rick came out to sign autographs. I summoned up all my nerve and went to talk to Bruce, telling him about the conversation I’d had with Paul in NYC. He got John Weller and told him, “You sort that out.” I repeated my story to John, who looked a little skeptical but nonetheless went in to talk to Paul. He came back two minutes later with tickets for all of us and instructions to see him after the show so we could go backstage.

Another blazing show, this one even better than the previous night. There was something about seeing them in that packed room, overflowing with people for whom the Jam were literally the story of their lives, that made it an exceptionally powerful experience, not really like anything else I’ve ever been privileged to witness. There was a hint of menace–a little bit of the football hooligan tone–in the way the crowd demanded certain songs; no real danger at any time, but just the sense of being on the verge of being out of control. In both a good way and a slightly scary way.

After the show, we went to wait patiently outside the backstage door. We waited and waited, and eventually realized that we were going to miss the last train home if we waited much longer. I wanted to stay–I’d have slept in the middle of Guildford High Street if I’d had to–but I was outvoted by my traveling buddies, so I missed a chance to hang out backstage with the Jam. In England. Near their hometown. Twenty-three years later, I still haven’t quite gotten over it, evidently.

The next, and last, times I saw them, they were at the Palladium in NYC. Big theater, mean bouncers, couldn’t get too close to the stage, but none of that interfered with how great they were. Musically, those were the best shows of theirs that I ever saw; Paul’s singing was the best I ever heard it, the mix was just right, and they were, again, close to perfection without “sounding just like the records” in the least. Blistering, stunning, riveting punk rock. A perfect way to end a short but intense few years of Jam-watching. There have been bands I’ve loved as much, been taken over by as much–two of them, to be precise–but none that I’ve loved more.