Well, luckily, while waiting in line at the taco truck, I happened to run into nine or ten op-ed columnists and that MBA guy who keeps cornering you at parties. They were generous enough to take the time to explain the whole thing to me. Turns out they’re really smart, and people should ask their opinion more often! I wrote down everything they said. So here, now, and you won’t find this anywhere else, is the complete explanation of our current financial misadventure, as told to me by people who understand this kind of thing:

Alright, Henry, you’re standing in line, waiting to buy a burrito. But what if, instead of buying a burrito with four dollars, you just told the guy in the taco truck that you would pay him four dollars later? Sound like a good idea? Well guess what. You just ruined the economy. And gave four dollars to China, and by the way, I care about human rights now.

This is what happens when you borrow money you can’t pay back. This is what happens when you take out a mortgage with low payments which can quickly rise. My mortgage, by the way – It’s fixed rate. Actually, it’s not really even a mortgage, I have this, uh, it’s kind of an arrangement. Anywho.

It’s a house of cards, built on nothing. There’s no money holding it up, just promises to pay money later. What’s so frustrating is that it’s so. Blindingly. Obvious. My dog could have predicted this would happen. I remember, the first time I heard of a subprime mortgage, I said, this path only leads to one place. And that, I said, is a government loan to a major insurance company in exchange for a controlling stake in the company. Yes, insurance company. Well, no. Not out loud. But it’s just so plainly obvious, I didn’t think it was necessary.

I mean, you’d have to be real idiot not to see this coming. A real out-of-touch, hoity-toity fancy-lad. Anyway, I hope some of that got through to you.

So you there you go. I certainly feel a lot better knowing that so many people are totally on top of things.

The Drive-By Truckers The Monument Valley

Strange that on an album of slice-of-life character studies, the most heartfelt song turns out to be about westerns. But then, who doesn’t love John Ford movies?

“It’s all about where you put the horizon / said the great John Ford to the young man rising.” The opening lines describe the act of moviemaking. On the one hand, nothing is more irritating then meta-art. If I have to read one more book which equates writing with physical creation, I’m going to punch a wall. And an artist’s desire to put on display his or her influences is understandable, but tedious. Yes, I’m sure you’re very well-read and that you know a lot about 1920s wax cylinder recordings or 1970s summer camp movies, but show me what you’ve got.

That said, this song pulls it off – mostly because it so accurately captures the long quiet landscapes of the best westerns. And by the final verse, the lyrics tangle John Ford the person with the famous line from The Man Who Shot LIberty Valence. “It’s where to plant the camera and when to say action / When to print the legend and when to leave the facts in.”

In the end, far truer to what makes westerns so enduring than Burt Bacharach’s song The Man Who Shot LIberty Valence. (Sample lyric: “Cause the point of a gun was the only law that Liberty understood / When it came to shooting straight and fast, he was miii-ghtyyyy good!”)

Daniel Johnston King Kong

This might be the most straightforward film-to-song adaptation. It’s a chanted summary of the film, told from the point of view of the titular monkey. Daniel Johnston’s childlike lyrics make for an interesting version of the story, full of straightforward descriptions like “He stripped his woman / he stripped her bare / but there was a pterodactyl / there.” It’s more of a description of individual things which happen in the movie, rather than a story.

The Jimmy Castor Bunch King Kong

Here’s another musical take on the same film, but where Daniel Johnston’s focuses on the obsession and fall of creature, The Jimmy Castor Bunch celebrate his power, size, and restraint, apparently. “He didn’t dance or party,” they tell us. But like Daniel Johnston’s song, a good chunk of time is devoted to straight up summary. Regarding Kong’s fight with a Tyrannosaurus, Jimmy Castor sings “He stretched the creature’s mouth until it split / Then like a child, began to play with it.”*

Bob Dylan Brownsville Girl

Even the most unappealing Dylan album has something to recommend it. Knocked Out Loaded, marred by weird 1986 production, and mostly uninteresting songs, has Brownsville Girl, Dylan’s collaboration with playwright/actor/former Holy Modal Rounder Sam Shepard. Clocking in at close to eleven minutes, it’s a winding, half-sung, half-spoken song about, um, something probably. Dylan mentions a girl, a trial, a bunch of places in Texas. Mainly, the song seems to be about this movie Dylan seen one time, ’bout a man riding ‘cross the desert and it starred Gregory Peck. As Dylan ruminates his way across the song (“The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter is that his name wasn’t Henry Porter”, he sings at one point, and at another, “Oh if there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now”) he returns to his Gregory Peck movie again and again. He thinks he sat through it twice.

*I would’ve included The Jimmy Castor Bunch’s Dracula as well, but in fairness, that’s probably based on the novel.

I was in high school. My friends asked if I wanted to go to the Brentwood Country Mart for lunch. Sure! I got in the car. I had a class at 1. We’ll be back by then, right? Nope. Disappointed, I got out of the car and ate lunch alone.

A few hours later, after I got out of my 1 o’clock class, I saw my friends again. Here’s my best attempt at a transcript (six or seven years after the fact) of what my friend Ben told me.

We’re sitting at a table in the food court, and I see George Carlin come in. He’s going to a table on the other side, so he’s heading our way. I whisper “That’s George Carlin!”, and as he goes by he says “Quit whispering, it’s not working.”

For the record, my friend Ben is very loud, even when whispering. He also did his best impression of George Carlin’s angry voice when George Carlin spoke. Back to the story.

So we finish eating, and we’re just hanging out there. Eventually, we see George Carlin get up from his table, and start walking out, so he’s walking past us again. This time, because we all know that he knows that we recognized him, we just kind of smile at him as he goes by. He leans over, and says “Why don’t you kids quit gossiping about celebrities, and DO YOUR FUCKING HOMEWORK!”

So there you go. The day I ate lunch alone, when I could have gotten cursed at by George Carlin. All because I didn’t want to be late for class.

Type “How” and the toolbar suggests “How to tie a tie.” Something ordinary, yet complicated enough to occasionally require instruction. Fair enough.

Type “Why” and the toolbar suggests “Why did I get married?” Whoa, that’s a little bleak. Probably most people performing this search are looking for the Tyler Perry movie, and aren’t asking google to solve their unsolvable problems.

Type “Is ” (with a space after it) and, near the end of the list, google suggests: “is barack obama muslim?” I guess that’s a pretty popular search. Still. Huh. Luckily, someone has started a website to answer this question. Is Barack Obama a muslim? That site seems to have a definitive enough answer.

Of course, I think the best response to that question, rather than an actual answer, is a simple “Who cares? And also, what the hell?”

It occurred to me that the Rev. Wright pseudo-scandal is very similar to the Obama-went-to-a-madrassa-and-is-therefore-a-secret-muslim pseudo-scandal. Both seem dumb enough to dismiss easily, but both have stuck around for a surprisingly long time. And they both ask the same question – “What’s Obama hiding?” Usually, most political candidates aren’t accused of being double-agents, but I won’t be surprised if we see this question pop up again in another form soon.

After Pet Sounds, Brian Wilson started work on Smile. Mental health problems led him to stop work on the project for 40 years, but not before he finished a few classics, including Heroes and Villains, Good Vibrations, and – one of my favorite songs – Surf’s Up.

This song provokes a near universal reaction: “That’s Surf’s Up? That doesn’t sound like surf music at all.” It’s strange, haunting, and oddly sad. The lyrics, by Van Dyke Parks, are some kind of American class system gibberish, somehow made poignant by the weird leaps in the melody. The Beach Boys always sang high, but in this song, and particularly in the solo recording in the clip above, the song sounds otherwordly.

That clip, by the way, is from a Leonard Bernstein TV special on pop music. Bernstein introduces the song by saying something to the effect of “95% of modern music is crap. This song, though, is OK, I guess.” I’d like to find the full recording of that show, or at least the full recording of Brian’s performance.

Hinterland is a nice album. That may sound like faint praise, and those who demand that their music be edgy and challenging at all times may find little here to like, but I mean it in the best possible way.

I found Old Man Luedecke the same way I found the Ditty Bops – on Pandora. I believe the station for both of these was a mix of Townes Van Zandt and Dan Hicks. If you haven’t tried that yet, I highly recommend it.

The title track came on, and I liked it immediately. The low-key banjo and the melancholy chorus got under my skin. Hinterland is a song you can live in. After it popped up for the third or fourth time, I bought the whole album.

None of the other songs match the power or feeling of the title track, but the album is full of nice moments.

The song proper starts around 1:15.

The songs are catchy enough to be immediately enjoyable, and simple enough to stand up to repeated listens. The lyrics are… well, they seem sincere, and appropriate to the music. Really, the main draw here is nice melodies in an upbeat pseudo-traditional style. I’m looking forward to hearing his latest.

Old Man Luedecke – Hinterland: ★★★★☆

In fact, his music seems to be going so well that he has a surplus of songs. How else to explain the presence of previously unreleased Dylan recordings on countless compilations, tribute albums, and movie soundtracks, including a 2007 movie which I hadn’t heard of before, called Lucky You. Dylan contributed Huck’s Tune, which apparently played over the end credits.

This song is straight up gorgeous. It’s a murky waltz, full of long organ notes and sparse guitar picking. Dylan croaks through what sounds like an ancient melody, singing with what sounds like a genuine melancholy smile. And the lyrics embody what Dylan in his current incarnation does best – gone is the dazzling but showy wordplay, replaced with a more subdued sense of wordplay. “The game’s gotten old, the deck’s gone cold”, he sings at the end, and he sounds sad but not surprised or even disappointed.

Bob Dylan – Huck’s Tune: ★★★★★

Look, this should not be that surprising. The FBI folks probably feel constrained by their dependence on judges to grant subpoenas. People chafe under authority – it’s human nature, everyone does it. The problem is that the  FBI are supposed to be constrained by the judiciary. The US government was set up to spread the power around. The players try to pull the power towards themselves, and away from anyone who performs oversight on them (see also: the president).

All of this is normal. The problem is the response. When these power grabs are attempted, they need to be slapped down. The judiciary should be pushing back. Maybe the FBI had the greater good in mind – I honestly don’t know. But no matter how noble their intentions could well have been, there’s no knowing what future leadership will be like. Which is why they shouldn’t have the power to seize documents willy nilly.

The music rotation defies any attempts at logic or analysis. I used to consider Exile on Main Street to be a decent album, but I didn’t understand what the hype was about. Then one day, I noticed that it had been in heavy rotation for close to a year. What was it about that album that was durable? Why did I get tired of countless other albums, but not that one? To this day, I still can’t put my finger on the answer.

Of course, they can’t all be Exile on Main Street (although I did have a similar, “Hey, I’m still listening to this” experience with the Kelly Joe Phelps album Lead Me On). Most albums naturally fall out of rotation for a while. And with these albums – particularly with more recent releases – it can be unclear if the albums fell out of rotation because it was time for something new, or if it was because they were never that good to begin with. Will these albums hold up? Or was I listening to them only because I wanted something new to listen to?

Which leads to today’s piece, Is That Still Good?, which very well might possibly become a recurring feature. In Is That Still Good? we look releases from a few years back, which we may not have thought about recently, and see how they hold up. One point – this is not about nostalgia. I’m not talking about how much you liked the “You’ve Got the Touch!” song from the Transformers cartoon. This is about that album you used to listen to when you were hanging out with your friends that summer.

So, this brings us to Eels, and their 2003 album Shootenanny. I had just purchased an iPod, which was the first portable music player I had ever owned. Shootenanny was one of the first albums I listened to while walking, and it seemed perfect – it was springtime, I had an iPod, life was going great. It was full of bleak lyrics, but had toe-tapping beats and simple, catchy melodies. It was in heavy rotation for that spring, and stayed in light rotation for the summer after. Eventually, it was phased out as a new batch of new music came in – probably TV on the Radio, or whatever my dad happened to have sent me (look for an upcoming review on Dad Music).

The question is: Is it still good? Does this album have some depth to it? Or some staying power? Or did I listen to it because I didn’t want to listen Belle and Sebastian anymore? (And for the record – Belle and Sebastian does not hold up.)

Answer: It is still good. The sound on the album seems very 90s, despite having been released in 2003. It doesn’t sound dated, though – just pleasantly old fashioned. The songs are simple, verging on the simplistic, and the backing tracks often consist of nothing more than a few measures of music repeated over and over and over. However, this also means that there is little to get tired of. Gimmicks which sound new and exciting at first often quickly become annoying – luckily, E pretty much avoids them, writing simple songs with simple arrangements and clever lyrics. Plus, the album contains a few classics. Saturday Morning is told from the point of view of a kid who has woken up early. And Love of the Loveless is a perfect little pop rock song. And it turns out that Shootenanny is still a great album to walk to.

Eels – Shootenanny: Still good.