Pages tagged “issue 6”

The opening moments of Secondhand Lions might be a whimsical tribute to its biggest star. A biplane carrying Robert Duvall careens through the air, buoyed by bombastic musical fanfare. For a moment, it looks like Colonel Kilgore (Apocalypse Now) has retired and become the Red Baron.

And with that, we plunge headlong into a fast-paced feature that bears a striking structural resemblance to this year’s other above-average family film, Holes. Both are coming-of-age stories—realistic dramas that flirt with fairy-tale whimsy. And each is a time-hopping tale of one family’s remarkable history, buried treasure, dangerous animals, exotic Indiana Jones-style adventure and a host of ethical lessons. Writer-director Tim McCanlies also returns to some of the themes he explored in his script for the underrated animated gem The Iron Giant. Like Giant’s Hogarth, young Walter (Haley Joel Osment) is a boy without a father figure who becomes attached to older, more experienced characters—this time, to two half-crazy uncles named Hub (Duvall) and Garth (Michael Caine), instead of a malfunctioning robot. And once again, the boy’s relationship with his new hero gets upset by the meddling of a violent, arrogant investigator (Nicky Katt).

When Walter’s man-shopping mother (Kyra Sedgwick), a dishonest and irresponsible woman, abandons him on a farm to spend the summer with the pair of eccentric geezers, she gives him troubling instructions: She wants him to find the fortune the uncles are rumored to have hidden. So Walter, wounded and frightened, whiles away hours on the front porch with his reluctant guardians. Eventually, Garth begins to narrate the adventures he and Hub had when they were young. As he explains, Walter’s fear transforms to a mix of awe and disbelief. We get flashbacks of rowdy action—clearly enhanced by Walter’s imagination—in which Hub and Garth rescue a princess, win a fortune and battle a sneering sheik. Meanwhile, back on the porch, old Hub chews his tobacco, cusses and watches for salesman to approach the house so he can open fire on them with his shotgun.

While Walter needs a role model, his uncles need help, too. Both are slowing down, burdened by age, loss and an abiding sense of "uselessness." Thus the story reflects important truths about how grownups can find purpose in passing their experience and wisdom to the young, instead of merely feeding off nostalgia. It also emphasizes the need each child has for a mother and a father.

Much of that potential is, however, unfulfilled, because McCanlies crowds his small stage with too many platitudes. Worse, every lesson is delivered with a heavy helping of canned emotion, accompanied by Patrick Doyle’s musical exclamation points.

Still, there is much to enjoy. Duvall and Caine bring subtle complexity and rugged authenticity to their enjoyable, if not Oscar-worthy, performances. An amusing supporting cast of animals—dogs, a pig, a giraffe, and a lion—gets some laughs. Cinematographer Jack Green (Unforgiven) finds some wonderful moments in moonlight on a lake. These days, any family movie with a little beauty, some poetry and the guts to assert that a child needs a supportive mother and a loving father is a step in the right direction.

With his performances in The Sixth Sense and A.I. (Artificial Intelligence), Haley Joel Osment proved he can access deep reservoirs of emotion playing complex heroes in a cruel world. Here, however, he might have been miscast. His performance is a tad too intense for a film that is light, tongue-in-cheek, even cartoonish. And yet, you can’t take your eyes off him. It is fascinating to hear his changing voice and see the final days of his cherubic face as it catches up with his frame, which is taller and more angular. In that sense, he underlines the film’s focus on the temporality of youth and the heavier responsibilities that come with growing up.

As moviegoers these days are offered irresponsibly made "family films" and movies that aim too low, perhaps there should be hearty applause for one that tries to do too much good in its small space of time.

Bob Pollard is the king of funny names. His band, Guided By Voices, is about to release its 14th record, Earthquake Glue (Matador), which features such word-salad titles as “I’ll Replace You With Machines,” “The Best of Jill Hives” and “A Trophy Mule in Particular.” He’s also hard at work on Pinball Mars, the next record from his Circus Devils side project, and yet another GBV album—possibly to be titled Unconditional Saviorism, though Pollard is known for not committing himself until the last possible moment. And then there’s the new GBV box set, Hardcore UFOs, due out in November, which will give fans access to the high noon of Guided By Voices’ critical success—a period when Pollard and then co-writer Tobin Sprout created lo-fi, Cheap-Trick-channeling-the-Monkees-through-an-Edison-wax-cylinder classics like “Kicker of Elves,” “My Valuable Hunting Knife” and “Burning Flag Birthday Suit.”

“I find that if you come up with an interesting title, you have to write a song for it,” he explains, laughing. “A song with a name like ‘Kicker of Elves’—how can it not be good? When you see a title like that it makes you want to buy the record.”

Maybe. If you’re a longtime fan of the Dayton, Ohio-based songwriter, though, such a “technique” might also make you wonder how many more titles, let alone melodies, he can come up with. The notoriously prolific—and, some would say, notoriously uneven—Pollard estimates his lifetime songwriting output at around 4,000 songs, topping out at around 200 per year during the time of Bee Thousand (1994)—the album whose opaque cover art, enigmatic song titles (“Tractor Rape Chain,” “The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory”), and grainy production blindsided the rock-crit establishment and allowed Pollard to finally quit his school-teaching job and become a full-time musician. These days, he says, “I’ve slowed myself down”—meaning he now writes “around 50 [songs] per year,” most of which appear on the various side and solo projects released through his ever-lengthening Fading Captain Series, a numbered and continually expanding set of records released independently by Pollard.

“Any idea I had, no matter how half-assed or fragmented it was, we would record it,” he says of GBV’s early years—the “classic period” when the band, signed first to Scat Records and then to Matador, released the cluttered, addictive albums that garnered their reputation among indie rock fans. “We thought, we’ll record as many songs as we can, then we’ll sift through it later.” Thus albums like Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes (1995), Under the Bushes Under the Stars (1996) are landfills of breathtaking, poorly recorded melodies, some of them no more than fragments. Suitcase, the 2000 collection of unreleased Pollard demos that extends back to the ’70s and, Pollard insists, barely scratches the surface of his unreleased oeuvre. It’s no surprise to hear Pollard name The Beatles’ delightfully messy White Album as one of the five he’d take to a desert island: “You have to take the White Album. That’s the Bible.”

The band has endured many lineup changes—the biggest one in late 1996, when longtime member Sprout left, prompting Pollard to break up the lo-fi version of GBV and bring on Ohio rockers Cobra Verde as his new backing band. Afterwards, there was a stint at TVT Records, where he recorded the more conventional, big-rock albums Do the Collapse (1999) and Isolation Drills (2001) with producers Ric Ocasek and Rob Schnapf. But now, Pollard says he’s slowing down and tightening up. “I’m knocking around lyrics and working with structures until they’re perfect, something I do now more than I used to do,” he says.

Some of this stability he credits to GBV’s current lineup, which includes Doug Gillard and Nate Farley on guitar, bassist Tim Tobias and drummer Kevin March. “This band, more than any lineup I’ve had—and I’ve had some good lineups—they’re all able to do their homework and they come to the table with ideas. We don’t practice; we don’t need to practice. They’re very good at pulling off anything that I can come up with. It’s a bigger challenge for me as a songwriter; I try to challenge myself and them. It’s caused me to be a more mature songwriter. I don’t just bang things out; I find myself being more patient.”

Earthquake Glue is a self-produced record (like last summer’s Universal Truths and Cycles) that features three-to-four-minute full-band rock epics rather than the song fragments and grainy sound that pervade earlier efforts. “We did gain confidence by working in the studio with Ric and Rob—we knew we could pull it off. We didn’t like the fact that we were being told what to do, down to every detail, how we need to arrange songs, what songs needed to go on there, what the cover needs to look like,” says Pollard of the band’s TVT period, during which some fans accused him of selling out (especially after the widely panned Do the Collapse). They returned to Matador, Pollard says, because he missed having “complete creative control.”

“You’ve got the marketing people there who’ll tell you, ‘The kids that listen to albums at that Virgin Megastore and Tower Records, they’ve got these listening stations where they check out the record. You’ve got to have the best songs at the top.’ Well, it takes years for me to realize what the best songs are.”

Now that they’re producing themselves, says Pollard, it helps that Tim’s brother, producer Todd Tobias, “really has a lot of good ideas sonically. He does samples and loops and things.” (For example, a brick scraping against pavement forms the rhythmic backdrop of the punishing “I’ll Replace You With Machines.”) “He records these sounds and they totally take on a different sound … it doesn’t sound like what it is,” Pollard says.

“I feel we’re in a comfortable niche,” Pollard concludes. “We’re on schedule now for an album a year, to release an album every fall. It’s like clockwork and that’s something that I like.”

Despite his reputation as one of rock’s more spontaneous composers, the regularity of his recent efforts now extends even to his songwriting routine. “I kind of punch in a little bit. I like to do this; this is my morning routine. I like to get up early, which means 5:30, six o’clock nowadays, while my girlfriend sleeps for another six hours. I make coffee, sit around, look at my notebooks, write lyrics, pick up a guitar, write some songs.”

It should surprise no one that the composer of “At Odds With Dr. Genesis” writes his lyrics “kinda stream-of-consciousness. Things that are going on around me seem to filter into them,” Pollard says. “I write about things that my friends say, the way I’m feeling, things I hear and read and see on billboards.” That explains the relatively explicit post-9/11 skepticism that seems to seep into Earthquake Glue on tracks like “My Kind of Soldier” and “My Son, My Secretary, and My Country.” “I don’t sit down and say ‘I’m going to make this political statement,’ you know,” Pollard says. “It’s hard to avoid that sort of thing … I realize that we, in these times, we have to rally around the flag. I just don’t—can’t—get into it. I don’t know what the agenda is of world leaders. I don’t feel empowered.”

As a composer, Pollard has a way of combining the oblique, inward qualities of indie rock with the anthemic forwardness of classic rock. You’ll be lulled by a track’s elliptical melody or cryptic lyrics, only to have Pollard blast your ear with a loud macho riff or some glam-rock chord snatched from the arena and made to sound—through the tension with its new surroundings—richer than before. “I like contrast and contradiction,” Pollard agrees. “Even lyrically, like I would write this heavy lyric and then lay this goofy chord progression over it.”

This, along with Pollard’s “record-first-critique-later” approach, made the old Guided By Voices albums feel like an infinite, perfect thrift store to some. But the spottiness drove other listeners—who like their albums a little more polished and a little less crunchy, thank you—absolutely bonkers. The latter are likely to be pleased by the development shown on Universal Truths and continued on Earthquake Glue, while those who miss the old scattershot Bob Pollard can take comfort in his solo and side projects. These are blizzard-like in their profusion, and include the recent Motel of Fools, various collaborations with past and present Guided By Voices members, and Kid Marine, the 1999 solo album that Pollard considers his favorite of all his work: “It’s kind of just about living in Dayton, living in the Midwest, watching TV and drinking, and there’s not much more to do than to go to work and do that,” he says. Among his collaborations are various reunion efforts with Sprout, and the aforementioned Circus Devils, a band including GBV bassist Tim Tobias and his brother Todd, which Pollard says “allows me to showcase a little darker side of myself.”

Most of these works are part of Pollard’s Fading Captain Series. “In the interim period between Matador and TVT,” Pollard explains, “we were kinda contractually bound [not to release any new music]. When we went to the bargaining table, one thing we asked for was to give me this creative outlet, because when I’m not making music I just get depressed. They said ‘You can do what you want on this label, but it’s gotta be low-profile.’ It’s kept me active, kept me happy, it’s a second source of income … it’s allowed me to splinter my personality into different projects. [In the past], everything went into Guided By Voices—those records had slightly more diversity. All the weird shit, all the jams, all the fragments, even including stupid songs.” Now, he says, “I separate them by category: ‘This is gonna be a Bob Pollard record, this is a collaboration, this to me is Guided By Voices.’ Now I find myself saving my most mature songs for Guided By Voices.”

Among the most notable of his collaborations is last May’s Beard of Lightning, on which Pollard sings his own new lyrics over the instrumental tracks from the final album by ’80s power trio Phantom Tollbooth, Power Toy (1988).

Pollard considered himself a “fan” of Phantom Tollbooth’s music but felt that the original album’s vocal stylings went “too much in the direction of indie rock,” he said. “I told [Off Records president Chris Slusarenko] I’d be interested to make that into more of a classic rock album.” Slusarenko contacted Phantom Tollbooth’s original members, who gave both their consent and the original album tapes to the project, thus helping to originate an entire potential subgenre of Bob Pollard sing-along records—surely a postmodern theorist’s dream. “I’d like to redo Houses of the Holy,” he laughs. “I like Led Zeppelin, but I’m not a big Robert Plant fan … he always has to go to that high register, and it just goes right through you. On ‘Saturday Night Live,’ they had that sketch, ‘Plant or Animal,’ where they played a sound and you had to guess which one it was.”

Comfortably reinstalled at Matador, GBV completed major recording for Earthquake Glue in “about 10 days. The last one took about two weeks, the albums before that took a month. We had our shit together a little more on this record. We’d already worked with Todd [Tobias]; we already knew what we wanted.”

“Everything feels good with the chemistry,” Pollard says of the most recent—and, he hopes, permanent—GBV lineup. “I can’t see me having to ask someone to leave. Hopefully this’ll be the lineup. I don’t like changes, to tell the truth; most people that have left my band—there’ve been a few [exceptions], but for the most part people make decisions to leave based on some kind of personal problem of their own, their family.”

Some of those departed GBV-ers may briefly return to the band’s lineup around November, when the Hardcore UFO box set comes out. “I think we’re trying to schedule something around the release—a few shows where past members come onstage with us, everybody who wants to. I think we’re going to have Toby [Sprout], Mitch Mitchell if he wants to … it’s going to be fun. It’s Guided By Voices’ 20th anniversary, and it’s Dayton’s sesquicentennial.”

These reunion shows are for nostalgia’s sake only, no more than a quick look back from a securely inhabited present, much like the Simon and Garfunkel reunions (at least for Simon). “I’ve gotten to know Guided By Voices better, what it is,” Pollard says. “At one point I thought we were too derivative of other stuff. I thought we didn’t have our own personality. Now I think it’s all kind of twisted or molded itself into something people can identify—‘That sounds like Guided By Voices.’”

What is that sound? Maybe it’s the sound of lunatic, hallucinatory productivity… maturing.

On the cover of The Innocence Mission’s new album, Befriended, you see a man inclining his head while a woman, eyes gently shut, seems to be offering some intimate secret that belongs to him alone. Perhaps it’s a declaration of love, or simply an inside joke that no one else would understand. Regardless, whoever designed the album’s artwork had a keen sense of the music contained within, and realized this particular image speaks volumes more than any blurb-filled sticker ever could. To listen to Karen Peris’ hauntingly exquisite voice is to feel like you’re being entrusted with something precious, a captivating secret to unwrap slowly and savor. One crystalline syllable at a time.

Over the phone, Karen’s whispery voice is barely audible in my receiver, so I listen as intently as I can, assuming that she’s afraid speaking too loudly might wake her two young children. Her husband, Don, who happens to make up another third of The Innocence Mission’s line-up (leaving only bassist Mike Bitts unaccounted for), gets on a separate line so that he can join in the conversation as well.

“We really haven’t done any extensive touring since our son was born five years ago,” Karen says. “We’ll do some concerts this fall, and we’re looking forward to that. But it won’t be in one long stretch.”

Neither parent seems to mind that their days of extensive touring have been cut short due to the children. Karen even mentions that a couple of the songs on the record were written expressly for them, namely “Martha Ave Love Song” and Befriended’s opener, “Tomorrow on the Runway,” in which Karen says she expresses her wish “to follow the light of my children and not continue to get bogged down in regretful thoughts of the past, to not be self-conscious, to follow their light and leave myself behind.”

Karen, Don and Mike weren’t far removed from childhood when they first performed together as the stage band for their Lancaster, Pa. Catholic high school production of Godspell. Several years later they had a record deal with A&M and a band name which seemed to offer a semantic impression of where their music was headed.

Don claims the band never dreamed of achieving rock stardom before adding, “Well, maybe before the first record we expected more than what was possible, but that was a long time ago.” After more than a decade of creating music and touring the country, expectations for the band have been refined accordingly. “Now for many, many years, we’ve just hoped that the record will find people who embrace it, that it means something to. And that’s something we hope happens every time.”

Listening to a record by The Innocence Mission is to have your heart broken and lovingly bandaged, over and over and over. In “Tomorrow on the Runway,” Karen sings, “Oh be the music in my head, the air around my bed / Oh be my rest / Replace the small disgraces of the times and places that I never really left.” Digesting lyrics like these means exhaling an assortment of sighs, each one distinctive—sorrow, contentment, lovesickness, nostalgia, joy. Occasionally in the same breath.

Befriended contains a dedication from Karen to her recently deceased mother, Mary McCullough, in the form of a song called “I Never Knew You From the Son.” Karen’s plaintive, ringing voice floats over strains of somber piano, proclaiming, “Oh I had a friend. I had a friend I loved / Now I walk for miles into dark forests of piano songs / I’m lost.” But even in that time of loss (and feeling lost), new life had found its way into the Peris’ life.

“A few months before my mom died,” Karen recounts, “my daughter was born, so there was that great joy as well. … That’s why a lot of the songs on our records contain sorrow and joy, because that’s the way most people experience life.”

The history of the Catholic church in the last century is one of both triumph and failure. Its triumphs include Vatican II’s modernization of the church, its role in resisting communism and its deep commitment to seeking peace and helping the poor. But lately, its failures have been broadly displayed. In America, of course, the focus has been on the disturbing cases of pedophilia among priests. And now director Peter Mullan's new movie attempts to expose the horrific conditions suffered by thousands of Irish women.

The Magdalene Sisters is a powerful look at the Magdalene convents to which wayward young women were sent, sometimes for the sin of promiscuity, sometimes simply because they were too flirty. There they were expected to devote themselves to their spiritual redemption, as well as work in the laundries that were a staple of the order.

The film focuses on three women, who all arrive on the same day. Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff) is sent to the convent after a cousin rapes her at a wedding. Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) lives in an orphanage until she gets too fresh with the local boys. And Rose (Dorothy Duff) has just given birth to an out-of-wedlock son. All three arrive at the convent and are confronted by the truly terrifying Sister Bridget, who takes delight in taunting the girls, cutting off their hair and promising both temporal and eternal retribution if they disobey her capricious orders. The other nuns who run the convent are little better. In one disturbing scene, they force the young women to strip and then hold a contest to see which girl has the smallest breasts, the most body hair. I found myself averting my eyes in pain.

Which of course is Mullan's point. He wants to shock and outrage his audience, and let us know what happened to over 30,000 women. The Magdalene Sisters begins and ends with a list of names, similar to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., clearly implying that the film has provided only a glimpse of the many whose lives were destroyed. Unfortunately Mullan gets carried away. The movie is so relentless and so bitter in its denunciations that it loses focus. It forgets that not every nun was a veritable spawn of Satan, that not every priest molested young women in his rectory. And by giving in to its passionate diatribe against the Church, the film undermines its own authority. A more level-headed, more balanced portrayal would have been just as compelling and much more convincing.

Still, the film is undeniably powerful, with three strong portrayals from its leads. Peter Mullan, a fine actor himself, knows how to elicit breathtakingly strong performances. Eileen Walsh, portraying a girl whose simple faith leads her down a road to madness, is especially compelling. When she starts screaming, "You're not a man of God," I thought the ceiling was going to cave in. Maybe that was Mullan's intention.

It was an entrance worthy of Oscar Wilde himself.

Two-and-a-half years ago, at the Los Angeles offices of his label DreamWorks, decadent dandy Rufus Wainwright came slinking in like a fox fresh out of the henhouse. In his chic Kenneth Coles, leather slacks and a rumpled dinner jacket he’d worn the night before, he collapsed into a meeting-room chair, brushed just-washed strands of shoulder-length shag out of his bloodshot eyes and croaked “Coffee!” to the nearest intern. “I need some coffee as soon as possible.” The New Yorker had been up all night at the post-Oscars Vanity Fair party, he hastily explained, squinting against the sunlight, and he’d finally crept back to his hotel room around eight a.m. And the list of celebrities with whom he’d hobnobbed was stunning: Sting, Eugene Levy, Joaquin Phoenix, Simon LeBon, Courtney Love, Patty Hearst, John Waters, Catherine O’Hara, and, of course, one of his best friends in the music biz, Melissa Auf Der Mar. He didn’t need java, I reckoned—his champagne-induced hangover called for some stiff hair of the dog.

But Wainwright—who was then just preparing to release his second set of fey piano-folk songs, the debauchery-themed Poses—was flying so high on his own hard-partying profile, he couldn’t return to ho-hum Earth. The chisel-cheekboned, muttonchop-whiskered son of legendary artists Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle had—since his critically touted eponymous debut in ’98—somehow managed to become everyone’s pet party guest, a regular recipient of every A-list invitation imaginable. Wingdings he not only attended, but often closed down in a typically drunken and/or chemical-related stupor. He was fun, all the stars seemed to agree, because he dared to be obnoxious, dared to teeter on the brink, dared to be a Wildean train wreck. Should he derail? Bravo, they might applaud. All the more charming.

In the early years of hawking his craft, Wainwright said at the time, he’d show up at bars and—after quite a few cocktails—begin to croon his originals from the pub piano. It was shameless self-promotion, he admitted. “But there was something kind of endearing about it, too, because I was probably the one who was the most drunk. I was not afraid to have a good time, not afraid to be outrageous and say, ‘I’m gonna be a star!’ There was nothing at all very subtle about me.” And he just couldn’t help it, he concluded—once night fell in Manhattan, he was out on the town boozing, usually bouncing from drawing-room sambucas to supper-club cosmopolitans, then straight into nightspot standards like beer, whiskey and tequila. Then, like a vampire, home to the mystic crypt before sunup.

Wainwright’s hands trembled as he steadied his coffee, a full five months before the 9/11 tragedy would change the world. Was there really anything wrong with such a selfishly carnal existence? he wondered. Especially when it led to such striking collections as Poses, which noted “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk” as a couple of his less deadly physical cravings. The singer’s answer would come soon, and in life-altering ways he wasn’t expecting.

Wainwright’s dad, Loudon, was famous for his ’72 novelty hit, “Dead Skunk.” His mom, Kate, was notorious as one-half of an eccentric folk act, the McGarrigle Sisters. But Junior—despite his delicately nasal singing voice and operatically grand keyboard melodies—was fast becoming known as a blinding Roman candle of a personality—a performer whose self-destructive behavior was bound to burn him out way before his time. The only remaining question: Exactly how much wick was left?

Cut to New York’s swank Soho Grand Hotel, a few weeks ago, a day before the summer blackout shut down the bustling metropolis. Right on time, in strolls Rufus Wainwright, and some differences are immediately apparent. Gone are the long hair and whiskers—he’s sporting a new Friends-short style and boyishly clean-shaven face. No suitcases sagging beneath his lids, either—in his suede sandals, flared jeans and skinny T-shirt, he’s bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, totally alive. No double espresso required. Grabbing a seat in the bar, he surveys a phalanx of liquor bottles, shakes his head and orders an iced tea instead. Soon he’s pawing through his messenger bag, looking for a shirt he might wear to that afternoon’s photo shoot—a vintage U.K.-sold McGarrigle Sisters tee, with his mom decked out as a toil ’n’ trouble witch. He cackles over it with his peculiar laugh, a rat-a-tat-tat report somewhere between Fran Drescher and Woody Woodpecker.

Why do fans become so Rufus-rabid? Perhaps it's his way of making all that decadence sound positively regal, through lace-latticed phraseology and majestic piano chords. One Poses madrigal, “The Consort,” for example, sounds like some dusty minuet beamed in from the harpsichord Elizabethan age. And it actually was influenced by the pomp-and-circumstance Queen, as played by Cate Blanchette in the picture-perfect Elizabeth. As the track builds to a trumpety crescendo, you can almost see the young Liz, walking warily into her own turncoat-rife royal ball. That's the unique power Wainwright has—to take visuals, whether cinematic or inspired by real life, and re-paint them through his piano palette into panoramic new vignettes. It's a rare gift. Because his subject matter means so much to the artist, it ends up feeling important to his listeners, as well.

The singer has a new album to discuss—Want (aka Want One), the first of an intended double-disc set, with the second (Want Two) to follow early next year. Produced by hip newcomer Marius DeVries, the 14-track set (recorded in London and New York) also features such stellar side-folk as guitarist Charlie Sexton, drummer Levon Helm, Linda and Teddy Thompson on backing vocals, mother Kate on banjo and accordion, even two orchestras and the London Oratory School Choir. And it’s quite a collection, from an opening monastic musing, “Oh What a World,” through gorgeous acoustic acrobatics like “I Don’t Know What It Is,” “Go or Go Ahead,” and “14th Street,” to the ornate off-Broadway-ish compositions “Vibrate,” “Vicious World,” [Ed: S/b “Vicious World”?] “Pretty Things,” “Dinner at Eight” and “Harvester of Hearts.” With, naturally, some delectable strictly pop sing-alongs sandwiched in between: “11:11,” “Beautiful Child” and “Movies of Myself.” All sung and played as if they were composed in formal tie and tails; Wainwright’s persona to a T: offstage disarray contrasted with polished onstage perfection.

Sipping his tea, Wainwright explains that the material just rocketed forth—he wrote and tracked 30 songs in only six months. Many, he adds, were penned while arena-rawk maestro Andrew W.K. was pounding at his piano upstairs from his nearby flat. “We didn’t talk that much,” he recalls. “But our common whining pleas to the cosmos would collide in the backyard.” Which leads him to a new theory he’s hit on: Wainwright is now dividing his life into decades, with his 20s revolving around “pop records in my version of that genre. But I hit 30 a week ago, July 22nd, Saturn returns, got my shit straightened out that I had to and realized that I don’t necessarily have to limit myself to the recording industry in terms of what I could do, musically.

“I mean, my first love is opera. And when I was a child, my mother told me over and over again that I could be “Annie” in a musical because sometimes they cast young boys.” Another Woody Woodpecker Titter (henceforth annotated as “WWT.”) “So I was brought up with that, and also my favorite singer as a child was Al Jolson. And needless to say musicals—especially musicals involving film—are the hottest ticket around right now, so music for the theater is pretty imminent for me. And certainly with the way the rock scene’s going, I don’t know … if I can hack it. I’m tired of trying to be too cool for school, but I still wanna be accepted by a wide audience. So it’s … difficult.”

Wainwright, however, has graduated from cravings to wants this time around. And yes, he says, he’s definitely entered a questioning phase with his two new forays. Part one covers deeper philosophical issue; part two is reserved for what he terms “more racier stuff, and longer stuff that’s sort of harder, perhaps even more theatrical, like nine-minute songs. And we assumed that once people had part one, they would buy part two. And there may be more answers on the second, but I think there might be bigger, more confusing questions too.”

Which brings us full-circle to the issue at hand. What brought on such sudden introspection? What dramatic occurrence in Wainwright’s life sparked this emotional sea change? He pauses, stares out the window for a minute. “Wellll … I … pretty much had a nervous breakdown” (WWT.) “From constant touring, excessive drug use and alcoholic drinking. I was doing a lot of speed and a lot of boozing. And I’m going public with the crystal meth thing just because if I can help anybody out and if anybody can not go through what I went through, or if anyone’s in that sort of predicament, then so much the better.”

How did the artist wind up living through a private version of the film Spun? It was a fairly easy trap to tumble into, he sighs. “I think what happened with me is that I had such a heavy schedule, and such a chip on my shoulder in terms of the” and he waggles his fingers to denote quotation marks “‘load I had to bear,’ and being hounded down all the time and being the center of attention. But once I did a little bit of crystal meth, I was off—I would just disappear. And especially with being gay and stuff, it just tied into all of those dark feelings that gay men have. You know, years of sexual denial and low-grade oppression in that department.” The escalator kept right on descending. “Every time I did [speed], it was like I was taking the biggest vacation, and death would be the best vacation. In that mind frame, the closer you got to death, the better it seemed. I was just really wasting my life for about a year. And after 9/11, it just got too dark in general—there was no longer any room for that type of denial and decadence, because it was just another world after 9/11.”

Wainwright doesn’t shy away from the gory drug-abuse details, either: “I went blind for about an hour—really blind, I couldn’t see anymore. And I lost my mind for about one second, and I knew it. … See, what happened to me was, I didn’t do [speed] a lot, but when I did it, I would do a lot of other drugs too—a lot of Ecstasy and Special K, until it just became a big snowball of drugs.” And he goes on to relate his absolute worst under-the-influence tale—of when he should’ve left a bar when he sensed things were going wrong in his drugged-out system, but didn’t—that’s downright hair-raising, everyone’s worst nightmare personified. He also found himself becoming “politically toxic”—yelling at his TV screen whenever news about Bush or his war in Iraq came on. Finally, it hit him. “I realized that if I’m gonna be at all effective in this dangerous world, or have an opinion at all in my next projects and go out and face the public, then I had to get my own shit in order, I had to rearrange my own house. So I had to go away and do that—I went to rehab, Hazeldon. I was there for a month.”

Whether you choose to follow a 12-step program or not, there is one important lesson that almost every rehab patient understands upon leaving: You use, you die. Period. With no gray areas in between. Wainwright is in total agreement. “My opinions vary on a lot of things,” he frowns. “But one thing for certain is There is no such thing as recreational, or casual, crystal meth use. And I think it’s really playing in the gay community big-time now—cardiologists must be making a fortune.”

Clean and sober, he dove into Want. “Part of the songs had been written beforehand, and then part of them are sort of answers to the questions,” he continues. “Because I do believe that I wrote some great material in the depths of my despair. But I also had to write some answers to that despair, to accompany these melodies. And that’s probably why I had so much material at the end, because a lot of these songs have their shadow images.”

For example, Wainwright cites “Go or Go Ahead”—a softly strummed sonnet with the lines “Thank you for this bitter knowledge, guardian angels who left me stranded / It was worth it, feeling abandoned”—and its post-Hazeldon reflection “14th Street” (“You walked me down 14th Street for the doctor to meet after thoughts of the grave / In the home of the brave and of the weak”). Another subtly chiming processional, “Natasha,” ponders “Do you really know how scary this is for you and me? / Do you really know?” Wainwright confesses that it was composed for a friend who’s currently “on the other side of the fence from me, who’s just gone through what I went through. There’s this space between us and I can’t really help them, so all I can do is lead by example. All I can do is write a song about it.”

Wainwright has few regrets about his trip into the abyss. He reasons that “I didn’t kill anybody, I wasn’t arrested, I made two albums, and maybe my eyes got a little puffy.” Fair enough. And he finally came to see the party scene for the shallow, pleasure-seeking sham that it is. He’s been working out, gulping vitamins and generally following an early-to-bed, early-to-rise regimen. When the sun sets each night he still gets uneasy, even a bit scared, he admits—”I equate it with going out, and Poses starts to play in my brain. So I don’t really go out to bars anymore—I’ve got DVDs and I still love going to the opera. And I also spend so much time at my piano, hours will just go by.”

In several Want selections, this former Good Time Charlie openly admits to having the blues: “Oh Lord what have I done to myself / In this vicious world” (“Vicious World”); “I’m looking for a reason, a person, a painting … a love that is longer than a day” (“Movies of Myself”); “I don’t want to know the answers to any of your questions … But I’ll settle for love, yeah, I’ll settle for love” (the title track). The irony is rich. The openly out Wainwright is the charismatic kind of star whose kinetic energy inevitably attracts a host of acolytes. Gay fans want to bed him. Straight women want to convert him. And just about everyone who falls under his intoxicating, self-deprecating spell (one kooky, aside-riddled concert is usually all it takes) covets, at the very least, a small spark of that fire to keep for themselves. Wainwright sees some of those hangers-on as “vampires,” scenesters who’d suck every last drop of blood from his desiccated body, then champion him as one more dead rock martyr. “A lot of people said to me ‘We did expect you to die,’” he murmurs, uncomfortably. “Which kinda shocked me’ ’cause some of ’em were people who were dear to me. And it’s an odd thing, because you expect them to try to run in there and save you at that moment.” He shakes his head, No—it never works out that way. “I suppose there’s a certain entertainment in just … watching. And I don’t think the people around you can be blamed for doing that, because if you’re gonna save yourself, it’s really up to you.”

Throughout Want, Wainwright considers the nature of true love. “But right now,” he says, “I’ve gotten to such a point in my life where I have to look inward and fix a lot of that yellow brick road that’s there. So the more I work on myself, the more attractive I become to that other person who can now see me in the daylight, as opposed to the haze. The hazy evening, where nothing ever really gets done.”

For confirmation, Wainwright gestures toward the glowing rays of afternoon sunlight, refracting through his iced tea glass. This, he sighs. “This feels wonderful.”

To test himself the night before, he dropped by one of the city’s jumping gay joints for a few minutes. It felt almost abstract, he reports. “My friend looked around and said ‘Are there any gays who aren’t alcoholics?’ And I said ‘Are there any gays who aren’t gay?’ Not to put the culture down—although I have every right ‘cause I’m one of ’em—but the whole club-centric, bar-centric thing is just so mediocre in my mind, in this day and age. I mean, 8th Avenue on a Sunday morning is such a wreckage zone. And the more ghettoized it’s gotten, the more being gay has become a party-centric lifestyle … I dunno, I just find it boring. And if you’re not doing that, then you’re really high and dry. That’s the only bone I have to pick with it. But I certainly love debauchery and decadence, but when there’s no artistic clout involved, or it’s all purely about size and sex … I dunno. I’m just sick of scenes entirely, maybe.”

If you listen closely to the Want title cut, striated within a roster of ‘don’ts’—“I really don’t want to be John Lennon or Leonard Cohen”—is a telling, perhaps Freudian slip. “I just want to be my Dad,” Wainwright warbles. “With a slight sprinkling of my mother.” And in retrospect, he’s quite cool with such a touching confession. “Certainly in my breakdown period, right before I was gonna go to rehab and when I was really screwed up, I was gonna either of two things,” he explains. “I was gonna go to rehab, or I was gonna go live with my dad in his backyard. He’d moved to L.A. and had a house out there. And I think that drugs can be revelatory, so I’d had a revelation of my father being the key to this cycle that he and I have been caught up in. And that it has to be broken and dealt with, and that it can be dealt with on this earth.

“Then when I got to rehab, I realized that this was a common thread through a lot of men. We were in all-male wards, and once you get to issues with their fathers, that’s when they break down. It’s odd—the love between a father and a son is really volatile. Then when I got back … I dunno, I just respected him more. I mean, for all the crap that he’s done to me and leaving me as a child, at least he’s always been honest and always taken care of himself. My father has always been able to survive, musically and career-wise, and he’s always been able to transform and better himself. So that’s when I realized that I do wanna be my dad, in a lotta ways. I mean, I wanna do my own thing and have my own career. But he’s such a survivor, and that’s what I wanna be.”

But what happens when that next Vanity Fair invite arrives in the mail? Could the inquisitive, fun-loving Wainwright truly decline such a five-star bash? “Parties?” he sniffs, confidently. “I can go to them. But I’ll tell you, there’s something far more intelligent in showing up at the party and leaving elegantly early. Show up elegantly late, leave elegantly early. I’ve done that many times lately—show up, do a little circle, then head for the exit. Thank you, and goodnight!”

As with much of Want, there’s a strong karmic undercurrent to what this artist has just said that warrants further investigation. The metaphoric message? Wainwright smiles contentedly. “I have to stick around for awhile, mainly because a lot of the other people—whether it’s Jeff Buckley or Kurt Cobain—have gone. And this industry has become such a grinding factory that a lot of songwriters aren’t even getting to come to fruition. So it’s very important for me to stick around and keep my wits about me, otherwise … there’s just not gonna be much out there for people to listen to. If I self-destruct, I do believe that it’s socially irresponsible because a lot of people need me right now, which I have to respect.” WWT.

“Oh yeah—and also, I really wanna live. I have family and friends, and I love being alive. You know, stuff like that. And I need those bigger answers! On my desk by Monday!”

Heartworn Highways, the fabled, previously hard-to-find 1975 film, has been re-edited, color corrected and re-mastered for its DVD release by England’s Catfish Entertainment. With the addition of over an hour’s worth of previously unseen footage, what was once an excellent film is now an essential DVD for Americana fans.

By 1975, a loose confederation of longhaired musicians had left Texas and invaded Nashville. They attended each other’s gigs and picked together in each other’s homes. Everything they did was focused on the music and the eternal search for a song.

Originally shot in Austin and Nashville, the film offers a rare look at what was then a fringe element of country music made by people who have since become songwriting icons. Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Rodney Crowell, Steve Young and a 19-year-old Steve Earle all feature prominently. The footage varies from Clark repairing frets on a guitar to Van Zandt fooling around on his farm and then bringing tears to Uncle Seymour’s eyes as he plays “Waiting Around To Die” in his kitchen. Eschewing narration, the director chose instead to keep the scenes as organic as possible, letting the music do all the evocation.

The varied scenes—the Christmas Eve picking party at Guy and Suzanna Clark’s house, the new footage of John Hiatt (with hair!) at legendary photographer and closet dobro player Jim McGuire’s house, Charlie Daniels playing in a school gymnasium, the performance by the outrageous David Allan Coe at the Tennessee State Prison, studio footage of Barefoot Jerry and Georgian Larry Jon Wilson—all combine to paint a picture of music that possessed a soul and vibrancy missing from much of Nashville’s current output.

Heartworn Highways is an intimate look back at a more innocent time in country music; it’s a film no true country music fan can afford to miss.

Study the lyrics of Life for Rent—the new sophomore outing on Arista from ethereal techno-cabaret diva Dido—and a rather startling picture emerges: “I cause nothing but trouble / I understand if you can’t talk to me again”; “It’s taken me a while to see you’re not so special … I found, tonight, what I’d been warned about”; “If my life is for rent and I don’t learn to buy / Well I deserve nothing more than I get.” A psychiatrist might hear these lines and pump a dose of Prozac into this somnolent singer, pronto. But surprise! When blonde bombshell Dido strolls leisurely into her San Francisco hotel suite, she’s all girlish giggles and toothy smiles. Depressed? Far from it, she laughs—with 12 million copies of her No Angel debut sold worldwide, as well as countless songwriting awards under her belt—the U.K. thrush is sitting in the coveted catbird seat, and pleased as punch about it.

Granted, sighs Dido, a sage-like 31, some of that sentiment sounds pretty sad. And she did recently break up with her beau of seven years. But she’s remarkably upbeat about it all. “It was just a case of growing up, growing apart, becoming different from how we were in the beginning, but not necessarily what either of us wanted,” she explains, sunnily. “So he and I are still brilliant friends, we get on really well and I think we’re both happier now.” After three years touring to support ’99’s No Angel—including a few weeks pushing Eminem single “Stan,” which sampled her dreamy “Thank You” smash—she felt no follow-up pressure whatsoever; with her DJ brother Rollo co-producing, she whipped together Rent over the past 11 months, knowing exactly what she wanted to communicate.

Which was? Dido grins, Mona Lisa mischievous. “I’ll tell you what I find really strange,” confides the keyboardist, who once held a high-powered position in British publishing. “I write songs, basically, and I try to write the perfect song. But I don’t document my life in my songs, although I definitely use personal things as a frame of reference. I use personal things from my brother’s life, my friends’ lives, or from people’s lives that I read about in the papers. But on the first album, everyone took the songs and sort of related them to themselves, which is how I take songs—I listen to music and I relate it to myself and it’ll transport me to some part of my life that I haven’t thought about for awhile.”

Not so with newer numbers like “White Flag”—despite its dark tone, already well on its way to becoming Dido’s next megahit. “With these new songs, everyone’s just picking apart my life, and I find that so strange. Because I’m not writing songs for you to understand me better—I’m writing to hopefully cause some emotion in you, as opposed to you having some insight into my head. Because, ultimately, you’re never gonna work it out because there’s such a heavy dose of imagination in the songs.” For example, she cites her “Mary’s in India” ballad. Sure, she has a friend named Mary who often trots the globe. But the rest of the cut—including a left-at-home boyfriend named Danny—is purely fictional. When pressed, Dido will admit that she’s beginning to “enjoy the fact that people are getting so obsessed with my lyrics that they’re just twisting themselves in circles, trying to work out what my life’s about. I think it’s funny—it really makes me laugh.

“But I’ll be honest—the day I explain every single line of every single song, it would be quite boring for everybody.”

Then—bubbling with effervescent energy—the undaunted Dido marches on to her next radio station interview, the umpteenth in a whirlwind Rent promo tour. “And I’m happy,” she declares. “I’m happy, but I do feel things very deeply. That’s the conflict that I have—I’m a totally optimistic person, but if someone tells me a story that’s sad, I can feel terrible. And that’s why I write songs, songs to make you feel something.”

Long before Al-Qaida, the U.S. had its own terrorist factions. But while Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh have been almost universally reviled, the Weathermen were hailed in certain sectors as heroes. A small, radical off-shoot of the '60s antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Weathermen were frustrated by the peace movement’s apparent lack of impact and took matters into their own hands. They first attempted to organize the working class and provoke violent protests and disobedience. But when that proved ineffective, they went underground and pulled off a string of spectacular bombings around the nation in the early '70s.

The documentary The Weather Underground, directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, looks at that time by combining old news footage and contemporary interviews with several members of the Weathermen. The former perfectly captures the early '70s zeitgeist, when the peace-and-love faction was splintering, cannibalizing itself in its own discord. But it also reminds us of a time when a large segment of the population was willing to take to the streets to protest injustice and oppression thousands of miles away.

Even more fascinating, though, are the interviews. Thirty years later, most of the Weathermen remain proud of what they did. Though it’s doubtful the bombings had much impact on American policy, the group’s leaders—specifically Bernadine Dohrn and Billy Ayers—rhetorically ask, “Was it a just cause? Was there a need to do something?” and then answer, “Doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence.” The documentary dutifully trots out a couple members with second thoughts, as well as dissenters; one calls the Weathermen “a children’s crusade gone mad.” But the filmmakers stack the deck, reminding us again and again of the horrors of the Vietnam War and giving much more screen time to the apologists.

It should be noted the Weathermen were a far cry from today’s terrorists. They methodically planned their bombings so that no one was injured. Still, the question “Was there a need to do something?” is a far different question than “What something should we do?” Nevertheless, the movie is a powerful historical document, as well as a potent exploration of the hows and whys of political dissent.

It’s Thursday night in New York, and I’m doing the schmooze-and-booze at one of the latest hot spots, paying more for drinks than I can afford but enjoying the eye candy. Striking up conversation with an attractive blonde, I casually acknowledge my profession—journalist—and notice her eyes widen. “But, like, what is a jamband?” she asks, taking a sip of her white wine as wrinkles of bewilderment form on her forehead.

Ah, yes, my favorite question. Sizing her up, I decide to go the short route: “Bands like the Grateful Dead, Phish and Widespread Panic.” I don’t care if people live under a rock, they’ve heard of The Grateful Dead and at least have a sense of what I mean. But it’s only that—an impression, an assumption, rather than an accurate idea. “Jamband” is a term that can be both positive and negative, loose but confining—just like the music.

The initial problem is in the word’s root: jam. Plenty of artists who jam aren’t associated with jambands: Wilco, Ani DiFranco, Tom Petty, even Bob Dylan. In these cases, “jam” means fairly tight song composition with minor improvisation. But in actual purpose, “jam” serves as a synonym for “improvise.” This is the element that takes hold of fans and gets them to willingly devote substantial parts of their lives in hot pursuit.

My parents were initially perplexed by my dying need to see three Grateful Dead shows within a five-day span my freshman year of high school. “Isn’t one enough?” they asked (as the blonde would later about my Phish habit). No, and here’s why:

Every show is different. I mean really different. You catch two nights of the Eagles reunion or two Coldplay shows in a row, and the song selection and arrangements will be very similar. Go to two Phish or Dead shows back to back, you won’t hear the same song twice, guaranteed. Both bands played six sets of music over two days this past August: 47 songs for Phish, 43 songs for The Dead. Besides other bands central to the genre like moe., The Disco Biscuits, String Cheese Incident and Gov’t Mule (to name but a few), no one else has enough songs in their current live rotation to regularly perform two sets of music at each concert they give and not repeat themselves the following night—or the next several nights, for that matter. Couple this with improvisational ability and technique like that of jazz musicians, and you hear songs routinely stretching out for 10 or 20 minutes, often segueing into one another. It’s a recipe for addiction.

Describing these band’s extended improvisations as noodling (which my attractive drinking companion and many others have), would be like saying spaghetti is the only kind of pasta. Sure The Dead can get noodle-y in their spacey, meandering jams but that’s their style. String Cheese Incident’s improvising, on the other hand, is lighter and airier, often with a large pinch of acoustic flavoring. moe. has a much fatter, wider sound that spirals up with energy as their dual guitars attack with a balls-to-the-wall intensity that takes its cues from hard rock. With a distinct Southern flavor, Widespread Panic puts its rock before its roll, delivering guitar-led jams that aren’t afraid to get dirty as they tumble around with the rest of the instruments. Self-described as “trance fusion,” The Disco Biscuits bring an electronic sensibility to their jamming. Meanwhile, Phish does it all, often in the space of one evening, their versatility being as much an attraction as their own complex, audience-friendly tunes.

“But the audience, they’re all dirty hippies that smell,” she smirks, a slightly devilish look in her eye. OK, fine, some are dirty and yes, some do smell. But hey, you try dancing for several hours, sweating profusely and not smelling. The crowd and scene surrounding jamband shows and festivals, particularly those featuring Phish and The Dead, is a distinctive one and certainly adds to the experience of attending a performance. Throngs shuffle down makeshift streets of vendors and solicitors hawking clothing, minerals, food, jewelry, beverages, glassware and drugs. Investment bankers decked out in polo shirts and topsiders rub elbows with dreadlocked, pierced and tattooed neo-hipsters whose hats are usually slightly ajar, shorts long and speech slang-strewn. Dogs bark, bottles break, babies bounce, money changes hands and a gamut of smells wafts in the air. It’s a party and, for the most part, everyone is smiling and happy—a nomadic and transient community of people who love music and a good time. This is tailgating at it’s best. There can certainly be a dark side to the peace, love and happiness, but the majority of fans enjoy the music scene (and all it encompasses) responsibly and safely.

She seems distracted now, glancing around the room in search of a friend or an escape. Act quickly, I think. “What’s cool, though, is that all these bands are totally down with other types of music.” A glimmer of hope appears in her eye. “Like, Kid Rock sat in with Phish and Gov’t Mule.” “I love Kid Rock,” she exclaims, pearly whites and gums being revealed like a Great White going in for the kill. “I do too,” I say, knowing it’s going to be an interesting night ahead.

Josh Baron is the executive editor of Relix magazine so, like, he knows what he’s talking about.

“The challenge is organizational,” says David Byrne, about his work providing music for soundtracks and dance scores. Of course, Byrne is most recognized for his work in Talking Heads, the seminal art-punk band that grew out of NYC’s late ’70s CBGB heyday. In the band’s latter days, it added to its legacy with a few unique movie achievements: Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads’ live concert film in ’85, and the quirky feature True Stories, in ’86.

Discussing his latest project, the soundtrack for the David Mackenzie film, Young Adam, starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton, Byrne laughs. “The director wants two hours of music, way more than he can possibly get or use. He wants it for no money, and he wants it tomorrow.”

Byrne won an Academy award for co-writing the score for The Last Emperor, the epic Bertolucci film, and has collaborated with choreographer Twyla Tharp, Brian Eno and Robert Wilson. Then, of course, there’s been a string of post-Heads solo outings, culminating in 2001’s unrecognized and vastly underrated Look Into the Eyeball.

Of the soundtrack process, Byrne says, “It becomes an issue of how much can I get done in a week, how many musicians can we afford, how much studio time will the budget buy us. You figure out what you have in hand and you make the most of it.”

Because not all of the music makes it into the movie, Byrne has released his own soundtrack album for Young Adam, Lead Us Not Into Temptation, on Thrill Jockey Records. The disc is a smorgasbord of subtle instrumental tracks, lush and stirring. He says, “I wanted to set a mysterious mood, but without a lot of electronic sounds. So most of the stuff on there are recordings of gates or trains.

“I don’t know if they make for the best listening,” Byrne goes on, “but I enjoyed the ones that were improvised, where there’s this real droning sound and not much happens. I thought that made a really cool mood and could be submerged really low in the mix. You couldn’t hear melody or anything like that, but it still had a presence that affected what you were seeing.

“In a way, the music is almost a contrast to the story. The story comes from a novel by a beat writer from Glasgow, and I didn’t even know there was such a thing. [Alexander Trocchi] was more in the vein of [Charles] Bukowski. It’s pretty grimy, low-down sex, that kind of stuff. I thought that if I could keep that mood, but maybe add a little bit of sensuality to it, so that you could see that there is some feeling going on here, that it’s not just all dirt and bodily fluids.

“I listened to a lot of the records of the bands from Glasgow and eventually decided that I should do it there. I was thinking that it would be nice if the whole movie was made in one city, and it would be fun for me to be there and work with the local musicians.”

Byrne also says he’s been writing music and will go into rehearsals soon for his next pop-rock album, set for release on Nonesuch Records.

My name’s Ben and this is McGowan. We’ll be your early evening entertainment.”

Ben Lee humbly offers this introduction as he and his lead guitarist take the stage at Atlanta’s Cotton Club, the dingy subterranean sector of Atlanta’s church-turned-rock-palace, the Tabernacle. Opening for power-pop dynamo Fountains of Wayne, Lee’s modest introduction and the drumless two-man acoustic/electric guitar act suggest the beginnings of an understated performance. After all, the tasteful beats featured on Lee’s new album, hey you. yes you., provided by producer Dan the Automator (Gorillaz, Dr. Octagon), are noticeably absent from the live show. But when the duo eases into its set, Lee’s charming, energetic stage presence and amusing banter instantly win over the crowd. The 24-year-old has the poise of a seasoned performer, which only makes sense. The Sydney native has been playing professionally since 1993 when, at age 13, he fronted the successful Australian indie band Noise Addict.

“I just found out you guys have a kangaroo conservatory here,” Lee says between songs, “that is f---ing weird!” He promptly launches into “Running With Scissors,” the opening track from his new album. With the painful losses Lee has faced this year—the passing of his father and a close friend’s lethal heroin overdose—he has turned to music to make sense of life’s tragedies.

“I think on this record I summoned a feeling like when I was teenager—you feel sort of self-destructive and realize things have a tendency to die,” says Lee, sitting on a ramp by the club’s dumpster before the show. The summer air is thick with humidity. It’s mostly quiet, except for the hum of air-conditioning units and a few concertgoers who’ve showed up early.

“You start to feel your own feelings when you go through death,” he continues. “Really, there’s no reason to feel sorry for the other person who died. Who knows what they’re going through? It’s like feeling sad because someone’s gone out for dinner. You don’t know—maybe it’s a great dinner, maybe it’s not. But you start to feel your own sense of sadness and you get to know—that’s mine. It definitely informed the songs on this album—looking at the darkness a little bit and wrestling with it and seeing how you can accompany it or how you’re going to deal with it.”

Ben’s earnestness is striking. At times he can wax philosophical in his Australian accent, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He has enough intelligence to be cerebral, but often takes a simpler outlook and seems to prefer the pure feeling to the thought.

“I try to write from a place of innocence,” he says. “I’m not trying to make it too intellectual. I just want to love the song when I make it. I want to better express my truth. My songs have always been love songs. They are songs of devotion and faith. So, I sing to God. My songs are songs of longing—to connect and to understand and to express.”

Recently, Lee collaborated on a four-song EP with aptly named ensemble, The Bens—that’s Ben Lee, Ben Kweller and Ben Folds. Unfortunately, inter-label disputes have kept the all-star band’s album shelved.

“When you work with other artists it can get quite political,” Lee says. “In some ways we made an album that was bigger than all of us …. I suppose you just have to look at it as if it’s a Zen sand mandala—you just have to do it and let it go.”

Joan Baez hasn’t written a song in 10 years, but she maintains an unerring instinct for choosing good material. Dark Chords, her first studio album in six years, mines the work of non-mainstream writers, but all should be familiar to Paste readers, including Greg Brown, Gillian Welch, Ryan Adams and Caitlin Cary. Her amazing voice is still intact, and while Baez has lost a bit at the high end, it’s replaced with an emotional power that wrings subtle emotion from every word—and silence. The singer’s current touring band supplies a moody, shimmering background that makes the work of disparate writers sing with one voice. Duke McVinnie’s sustained power chords heighten the drama of Welch’s tale of attempted rape and murder in “Caleb Meyer,” Greg Brown’s cynical lullaby “Sleeper” is brightened by a chiming acoustic guitar, and Josh Ritter’s “Wings” is given an almost folksy reading with McVinnie’s acoustic licks complemented by a bowed double bass and George Favori’s sparse percussion.

It seems unlikely that a band called The Long Winters could make something you’d call a summer album. And John Roderick—the group’s frontman and self-proclaimed “wounded lion”—seems an unlikely candidate to write the feel-good hit of that particular season. But there is an undeniable optimistic, breezy and, yes, summery feel to the band’s sophomore album, When I Pretend to Fall. To be sure, the record has its somber moments, especially the song “Blanket Hog,” which finds Roderick mourning his empty bed against a backdrop of cascading strings and feedback, but there is also something hopeful in Roderick’s scratchy delivery. Though slow to list influences, The Long Winters play earnest, American rock music very much in the idiom of Big Star. When I Pretend to Fall manages to be a welcome combination of optimistic and cynical—highly American indeed.

Lucero self-produced its latest release with mixed results. That Much Further West is, on one hand, the kind of record the down-home Memphis rock ’n’ rollers set out to make: a rootsy rock album with a no-frills, rough-edged sound. There’s the gritty, electrified Southern ballad “Sad and Lonely”; the jagged riffing of “Hate and Jealousy”; and the Paul Westerberg-channeling standout, “Tears Don’t Matter Much.” At his best, singer Ben Nichols sounds like a cross between Kurt Cobain, Patterson Hood and Jeff Tweedy, though—consciously or unconsciously—he mimics the latter’s vocal mannerisms too much. The techno breakbeats underneath “When You Decided To Leave” are a weak spot on the album, causing unnecessary distraction during an otherwise heartfelt song. Finally, there’s the static-laden instrumental, “Further West Reprise.” Such grossly out of tune guitar makes sense on a Wilco track like “Via Chicago,” where dissonance matches the lyrical content, but here it’s a failed experiment. Still, for an album like TMFW, the true test comes when it’s blaring from the blown-out speakers of a dim-lit dive bar.

My Morning Jacket listeners come in two basic shades: those who’ve seen the light, and those skeptically milling about still waiting for their epiphany. It Still Moves, the band’s sprawling new major-label debut, won’t do much to alter either party’s viewpoint. For those who worried a major label (RCA/ATO) might fundamentally alter the independent spirit of singer-songwriter Jim James and his cohorts, relax: The band’s formula remains intact—a country-rock base with elements of Memphis soul, classic ’70s rock and neo-psychedelic sounds, all drenched in salubrious washes of reverb. Besides, nothing says complete artistic freedom like 12 songs that average six minutes in length, many of which were recorded in a grain silo to give the reverb more