Got back late the other night from my cousin’s lovely wedding, held in a gallery / printing press south of Market. So sweet it broke my heart. Joined together by the spirit of Theodor Adorno. Yummy catered organic food. Fun music too; can’t say I’ve ever heard Nico played at a wedding before.

Drove back home, singing along to the mixtape in the car. I’ve now decided that my singing voice matches most closely that of Dean Wareham’s, and can probably accommodate Neil Young and Matthew Sweet somewhere there. And yes, it means I can serenade some lucky person with Luna’s “I Want Everything.” (To tell you the truth, though, it’s probably closer to Mac McCaughan’s strangled yelp.)

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My friend Karen and I have been e-mailing each other back and forth about “near-perfect songs,” and it just so happened that they were from the “indie rock” world.

Her first offering: Grant Lee Buffalo’s “Mockingbirds.”

My response: Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Two-Headed Boy.” (Well, I had these, too.)

To which she responded: The Strokes’ “Hard to Explain.”

You’ll need to register (if you haven’t yet) to read this New York Times Sunday Magazine article — it’s about A.C. Newman — but here’s the opening paragraph:

A new one arrives every three years or so. It comes from somewhere like Chapel Hill, N.C., or Dayton, Ohio, ringing out of a nearby jukebox or college station, alive with static and melody, a three-minute burst of joyful noise you find yourself playing every day because it makes you feel young and unstoppable and you can never quite figure out the words.

This would be the Irresistible Indie-Rock Anthem, a prime example of which is ”Letter From an Occupant,” by the Vancouver-based septet the New Pornographers.

So without further ado:

one from Chapel Hill (Superchunk’s “The First Part”),
one from Dayton (Guided By Voices’ “Motor Away”),
and one from Vancouver (see above).

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Whenever I ask my students — usually the ones in anthropology, since I almost always toss in an ethnography about music for them to read — what music they couldn’t stand hearing, and almost always the answer would be “country.” It isn’t hard to see why: the Twang-und-Drawl gets in the way, for starters, and I can’t see how suburban kids would ever be enamored of the whole jacket / boots / hat image. It’s a tough sell, and I’m sure they have visions of line-dancers whenever they hear “country music.” (That or Toby Keith.) And I usually respond with “How about Patsy Cline?” and most of them have no idea what I’m talking about.

Through the years I’ve listened to a good amount of “real” country music, and I think there’s something to be said about music to be listened to experientially — “I wanna hold your hand” or “I like it like that, she working that back, I don’t know how to act” most everyone understands, but not necessarily “The bottle let me down.”

Lyle Lovett might not be “country” per se — sorry, I couldn’t think of a good segue — but he draws deep from that idiom, and even on a slightly adult-contemporary song like the one below (picture sarcasm-quotes around “adult-contemporary,” by the way), the sentiment is still pure Hank Williams Sr.

Lyrically, he seems to commit the error of the unforgiveable cliche — but man, does it work here:

Now there is nothing so deep as the ocean
And there is nothing so high as the sky
And there is nothing so unwavering as a woman
When she’s already made up her mind

Hear it (6.9 mb).

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