David Byrne and Brian Eno's Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (is that a great title or what?) is out. The album is available exclusively from this web site. You can stream all eleven songs for free or purchase  the entire album in a variety of digital and physical formats.

Brian Eno says: “Without even discussing it that much, we shared a feeling about what kind of record this should be. We both wanted to make an album that combined something human, fallible and personal with something very electronic and mathematical. We wanted to paint a picture of the human trying to survive in an increasingly digital world.”

It is their first collaboration in 30 years, give or take. What's it  sound like? Oh, you know, a little electronic, a little country, a little gospel. It's a surprising, subtle effort - not at all what you'd expect a collaboration between these two men to sound like, especially compared to what they've given us before (remember My Life in the Bush of Ghosts?) - but a beautiful one nevertheless.

What were some of the first albums you ever bought?

Hooray! Here we go again! I love the Billie the Vision & the Dancers! Yay! And I love their newest album! Yay! I Used to Wander These Streets is great! That's a lot exclamation marks!

Yes, they just released an album last year, but here they are again with another one. What did I tell you about these guys? Aren't they fantastic? I'm starting to think that they're always writing songs. Other artists get their material from big, dramatic events in their lives (break-up, getting married, falling in love, loss of a puppy, etc.). But the Billies? They can sing meaningfully about bad TV shows and touring with The Pipettes (although that's pretty exciting, isn't it?). I bet they can write songs about trips to the supermarket. Hold My Hand is my new favorite song. Unspeakably lovely. It reduces me to tears.

Once again, it's available on their website for free download, so if you don't have it yet, you can go get it. But if you want to, you can also set your own price and support their record label. Let's show them some love! It's the least we can do.

...but if you're a boy and still interested, you can listen too. After all, boys write about girls all the time. You'd think they were obsessed or something. This list easily could run a hundred. But I've gone with five.

And just when I thought there wasn't any memorable solo-guitar act left today, I stumbled onto The Tallest Man on Earth.

His real name is Kristian Matsson and no, he's not really the tallest man on earth. But how adorable would that be anyway? I'd like to imagine that's how he opens all his acts. "Hello, I'm the Tallest Man on Earth." And his audience would laugh and love it, because young indie people loves them their irony. Or something. Okay. So he's not the tallest man on earth. But he is something even better. He's a young folk singer, a skinny dude with a guitar - and though you'd otherwise be weary and suspicious of another one of those, you'd only need to listen to his songs to realize that he has what it takes to set himself apart from the rest.

His full-length debut, Shallow Graves, is great. Finger-picked melodies, floor-stomping tempos and twangy vocals all around. It says something about our time, when we can find earnest Americana in Sweden. And I guess there's danger of seeming pretentious when appropriating from a genre but Matsson isn't just playing with the folk music genre. He's embraced it. You can leave this album on for hours and not get tired. Like the best folk music, it conjures images of old rocking chairs on rickety front porches on days with warm, orange sunsets. Matsson's music is clever but honest and, above all, comforting.

It's very easy to describe the album by comparing it to the work of a young Bob Dylan, but allusions like that have been too numerous lately, and there are people who claim certain acts to be "the next Dylan" make the title empty and caricature-like. In the end, the music speaks for itself and even transcends the comparison. Which is quite a feat, given the magnitude of the Dylan metaphor. And it's early in the year yet (and I still have a lot of albums to listen to) but I think I can safely say that I've found my favorite album this year.

tracks to sample:

I Won't Be Found
Shallow Grave
Into the Stream

The Chapter in Your Life Called San Francisco by The Lucksmiths

I realize now that I owe The Lucksmiths some fanmail.

Well, it wasn't San Francisco, but I guess that doesn't matter. It could have been anywhere. Anyway, it was a long time ago. He told me to wait and that he would be back before I even knew he was gone. And I did wait, but he didn't come back. And all I could think about was how he had gone. You've probably heard this all before. You may even know what it's like. You go through stages of thinking, when something like this happens. First you tell yourself that it's okay; any minute now, any minute, he'll be back. After a while and he isn't back yet you try to make-up excuses for him. Maybe he's really busy, maybe he has a million things to do, maybe he's staying up in a lone castle in a deserted old country where the nearest phone is a million miles away. On horseback. And then after another while, you start panicking. Oh my god, something has happened. He's broken a leg - no, both legs - and he can't walk. He fell and broke his hands and his neck and he's paralyzed. He was mugged and stabbed and they found him and brought him to the hospital, where he's just woken up and realized that you've been waiting to hear from him all this time. Then you realize that you're starting to sound like a character from a Dorothy Parker story - except even more ridiculous. And for the first time, you're just about sad and tired enough to be honest with yourself. Maybe he's not coming back. Maybe you were just never that important to him.

I wish I could say I learned my lesson, but I don't really know if there was one to learn. If there was one, it might have been lost on me. Maybe I could end by saying something like, this is why I'm not good at goodbye's, but that isn't the point either. And anyway, who is? Or maybe I could end by saying this is a story of the summer someone made me break my heart, but all I can hear, and rightly so, is a voice in my head saying "Sister, join the club."



So, tell me yours.

I Have Forgiven Jesus by Morrissey

I'm still told by many (and by many I mostly mean my mother) that we need some kind of ritual, something sacred in life. I've never argued with that - I think it's true. Thank goodness for Morrissey, who may be the closest thing I will ever have to a religious experience.

Hallelujah by Rufus Wainwright & Martha Wainwright
live from Glastonbury, 2007

It's like this; one minute I wasn't listening to Rufus and Martha singing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. The next thing I knew, I couldn't believe I hadn't been listening to it every five minutes of my life. Goosebumps all over. Tears in my eyes. On my lips, a cry, a cold and broken hallelujah, and in my heart, a prayer for all lovers everywhere.

So apparently, girls on LIVEJOURNAL post pictures and stuff about the boys they like. They've been doing it a whole lot lately, too. Then I realized, hey, I'm a girl! And I have  a LIVEJOURNAL account! Yay! Or something. So, yeah, here goes:


I was listening to Colin Meloy Sings Live and it's really great. It's got a number of Decemberists' songs, some unreleased stuff and some interesting segues and snippets of covers. Not to mention some witty and completely adorable in between song banter. Colin Meloy is wonderful live, and he even does this great thing where he tells about the worst song he's ever written:

Dracula's Daughter by Colin Meloy

"And I know that mostly, on these sorts of shows, and in any show, really, everybody just wants to, you know, the band on stage wants to exhibit the best effort, the best songs they've written - but I think it's fair that you should also do the worst songs you've written just to give people the sense and the balance. So tonight - I'm going to play you the worst song I ever wrote. And it's bad to the core. I mean it's -- you know right away. I don't know how I got past through the first two chords. I mean, the fact that I even put pen to paper is really terrifying. Makes one want to retire and be a college professor or something. It's that sort of thing that shakes the very foundation of your being, but I'll just let the song speak for itself."

Oh, Colin. You darling, you sport. You brilliant, literary indie-faced sweetheart. It is not easy finding the epic in everything, but you try, by the heavens, you try. And you succeed! Well, most of the time. Trust that this confession, this baring of your dark moment of lyrical weakness only endears you, you writer of voyages and fictions you, to me. My heart is still yours.

Starman by David Bowie

I'm stuck on David Bowie's Starman, probably because I heard it while I was watching an episode of Life on Mars again. I woke up today with the song playing over and over in my head. It was kind of a funny, yet fitting, feeling to hear it while struggling to shake off the last of my dreams. For a minute or two, I kept my eyes closed, afraid that I would wake up in 1973.



Every now and then you get one of those days when confusion and clarity are one and the same, when everything is misplaced and strange and you feel like a creature, lost and lonely in the wrong world, wrong year, decade or even century, stuck in the whirly gig of time. Here's to those days.

It's the End of the World as We Know It by R.E.M.

Okay. I know what Last Song Syndrome is - but what do you call it when you wake up first thing and there's a song stuck in your head already? That ever happen to you? I get this a lot, especially lately. Just today, I woke up to the sound of Shiny Happy People. I thought it was coming from a radio or the computer, but it wasn't. I was playing it in my head. On loop. I told Phil about it and he said I should've checked the bushes where Michael Stipe might have been hiding.

After I actually heard it again though, it went away. It did leave me, however, with a great craving to hear my favorite R.E.M. songs, which are mostly in the album Document. I've been playing the album over and over and over. I will have It's the End of the World as We Know It coming out of my ears for days. And I feel fine.

What's your favorite R.E.M. song?

Mathilde by Scott Walker

And just when I'm at that point when I'm so sure that there is no God, I hear a song that makes me stop and think things over.

Because this week has been a week of songs I can't seem to shake.

I still cry a little, every time I get to the end of this song.

The Clash or The Ramones? Honestly, I don't know. I'd never been able to answer, no matter how many times I've been asked before. Odds are you've been asked this, too. I could go by the old argument here and say something like they're two different bands (and they are) and they did different things with their music (and they did), blah blah blah, but apparently, that's not definitive enough for some people. There are people out there who feel like a serious music lover should and would make a choice. They ask this question as if it were a question, indeed the question, definitive article there, that speaks to all about your musical tastes. Is it really all that controversial? Has it ever really split a room? Did it ever cause any, erm, rrrrrrriots?

I think I can safely say that I have listened to a lot of both bands. In my younger years, I had dedicated a summer to each band. Summer of 1990, The Clash. Summer of 1991, The Ramones. Some say it's a battle between mind-rocking fun (The Ramones) and food for thought (The Clash). I think both bands were capable of both.

So I guess it's not so much a battle of music or musicianship but a battle of experience and memory. You can like both, in fact, if you're a fan of one you're probably a fan of the other. But most likely you discovered one first or feel closer or more attached to one. In my case, I did immediately love Blitzkrieg Bop and Today your Love, Tomorrow the World when I first heard them. Hey, how could you not? But I think it was that summer of 1990 that I sat in my room, completely blown away by the song London Calling.