We Shall All Be Healed has no sing-alongs. This is its biggest flaw, as far as I'm concerned. Often, the songs are very close, but there's obviously too much personal meaning in them for Mr. Darnielle; the choruses (when there are choruses) don't work on the same level as in earlier Mountain Goats. Where they used to invite you to exult with him, or to join his pain, these choruses don't. (Imagine singing along with "I am a mole." Can't do it, can you?) Mr. Darnielle probably didn't even write them with the intention of sublimating emotions; these songs are emotions. So the album's biggest flaw reveals itself to be that it's too powerful.

And yet also too subtle. All the Mountain Goats albums that I've heard are subtle, sometimes even maddeningly vague. I still can't put a story to any of them, and I would guess that's intentional. This album, although its story takes about as much form as any of them, remains outside my experience. I can guess what he means by most of the songs, they even make me feel a certain way, and yet they don't go under the skin. I still feel like I'm studying them, and they remain somewhat abstract. This is the album's second biggest flaw.

The music is great. I dont' mean the instruments, although they're more than adequate (and that organ on "Quito"--mmm, batampt). It's the vocal lines. They've got great fluid structure to fit the lyrics and the beat at the same time, great phrasing. I quite like the lyrics, too, but here, I think, is the reason for the prenominate greatest flaws. They're almost straight poems, with very little bowing to traditional song structure. They have stanzas rather than verses, and the choruses are often just two lines.

Plenty of exceptions. "Palmcorder Yanja" has a great chorus, song-like and quite fun to sing along with. "Whe-ere they-ee maaa-nu-fac-shured what I nee-ded!" Then there's "Garden Grove," and that "aa-ahh-oo," no complaints there, song as much as a poem. The aforementioned "Quito" is ear candy (that organ, woo). And the last song, again fun to sing along to.

I'm not saying that the rest is filler, I hope you'll understand. The rest also has great music, very memorable, hyper emotional. But what do you do with lines like "And once there was a deskAnd now it's in a storage locker somewhereAnd this song is for the stick pins and the cottonsI left in the top drawer"? Typical Mountain Goats, yes. Inventively fit into the song's rhythem, detailed and empathetic at the same time, sounds good when Mr. Darnielle says it, but . . . You know what, I'm wrong. That's a great line. I take back everything that sounded disatisfied.

Why I love Bob Dylan, vol. 1

I have a joyful feeling when I think about Dylan albums. He created so damn many (ten perfect albums in the 60s, a muddled but still Dylan period in the early 70s followed by two more perfect albums, late 70s Christian period, absurd yet endearing commercial albums in the 80s, a second act as big as Jesus's in '94 and '01), and with this constant output he revealed himself entirely. They all have a single mood: the expansively romantic feeling of an epic poem (Highway 61). the painful examination of a failed love affair (Blood on the Tracks), the paranoid, shiftless, claustrophobic sense of you against the world (Blonde on Blonde), playful absurdity and group mythmaking (Basement Tapes), dreamlike visionary spiritualism (John Wesley Harding). They're like old friends. I've seen every side of them, been through everything with them, know all their secrets, love hanging around with them.

Then there's the style of the songs. Overflowing words and a huge range, so you can quote them at any time, in any context. The voice, disentegrating over the years, always just beyond my ability to imitate, probably the best possible for these songs. The abounding energy of the music itself, alternately rollicking and whispering, echoing and air-tight. God, that guitar, strumming percussively away in the background, that high moaning train-whistle harmonica. The world never knew a 4-5-1 progression could have so many masks.

Also, just look at them. They're so pretty. Each one with a mug shot of Zimmy himself, drugged out or pissed off or grinning or staring or reclining or self-consciously posing. The minibus on Freewheelin'. The silly hat on Desire. The 'stache on Love and Theft. Dude, Bringing it All Back Home? Best album cover ever.

Tomorrow: my current thoughts on We Shall All Be Healed. I'll put off writing this essay if it kills me.

Sleeping way too often. Feeling weak in limbs and mind. Seeing many unlikely things in peripheral vision (today a lamp post was an eagle). Getting less sun than even I need. Constantly beset with compusion to go to indian casino. If had brick, would throw it through neighbor's window just to hear it smash. WhErE ArE yoU? ARe yOu tHEre?

Yes! I have received my awesome Beikoku Ongaku Japanese music magazine! Fewer pictures than I expected, but hey, a few of them is a Japanese hipster shopping for CDs. Also, there's a hella obscure mix CD of their favorite pop songs. And an article featuring a Japanese take on Lost in Translation.

Oh man, why did I buy this?

Infinity has changed HFS into a Spanish language/Latin music network. At least they let them go out with dignity. Or in great shame and as a travesty of their former selves, then kept around for cash.

Sometimes, yes is you. In any case, yes.

Fact: I really feel like writing aimlessly. I could write the essay, but that has an aim.
Fact: Flagg has become more vocal since the last time I was here. He will make little whiney mewing noises with no provocation, and also louder whines with provocation.
Fact: I like to tell myself I inherited only good traits from my parents. I have my mother's liberal openness, and her usually easygoing manner (and I at least don't think I'm lying). I have my father's interest and reasonable taste in art (not specifially paintings, mind you), staunch Democratic leanings, and intelligence. I did not inherit male pattern baldness (mother's father). I did not inherit lack of ambition (father's father). I did not inherit rage and strictness (father). I did not inherit terribly off-pitch singing (mother). I did not inherit shitty short-term memory (mother).
Fact: the reason the last fact was only "I tell myself" was because I did inherit bad sense of direction (mother), occasional ignoring of problems (father), a curt manner that makes sales clerks and non-friends on the phone think I'm angry at them (father), tendency toward overeating (mother), obliviousness (both, sometimes, to different things, both genres of which I got in varying degrees).
Clarification of parenthesis in last Fact: my mother can walk down fifth avenue and not notice the neon. (I can live in Annapolis for two years and never quite process the fact that it's on a shore, even though I often went to the harbor and saw a beach.) My father can be unaware that he is subtly implying things he does not intend to imply. (For example, I've gradually learned that some of the times that he sounds pissed off, he isn't. Also, I often think he is making jabs at relatives and friends, and he never is. I am aware that minor noises, glances, and pauses I make imply irritation when I feel none, and don't intend to express any.)
Fact: Jeff was awake when I got home, yes, at four a.m. He had woken up without reason and was watching the extended version of Fellowship of the Ring.
Fact: I often find myself choosing not to become interested in things that have the potential to fascinate me, or freak me out. I am self-aware about this. It is a strange thing which perhaps you will not identify with or understand.
Fact: Hydroplaning is all fun and cookies until you run into a guardrail. (I didn't run into a guardrail, or anything else, although I found myself widely varying in speed on Rt. 100, sometimes going down to forty-five, sometimes up to seventy. Luckily, I had the road basially to myself.)
Fact: I enjoy the taste of saliva-activated envelope glue. It is a taste unlike anything else.
Fact: An operational CD player will produce music when the play button is depressed.
Fact: Secret doors will sometimes open in secret locations when the secret trigger is depressed.
Fact: Skin will transmit a sensation to your brain via your nerves when it is depressed.
Fact: I am not depressed.
Fact: this list has gone on long enough.

4 Jess

Everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday
...And we pray, and we pray and we pray and we pray.
Everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday...
See you at the crossroads (crossroads, crossroads)
so you won't be lonely
See you at the crossroads (crossroads, crossroads)
so you won't be lonely
See you at the crossroads (crossroads, crossroads)
so you won't be lonely
See you at the crossroads (crossroads, crossroads)
so you won't be lonely,
And I'm gonna miss everybody and I'm gonna miss everybody
And I'm gonna miss everybody and I'm gonna miss everybody
And I'm gonna miss everybody and I'm gonna miss everybody
And I'm gonna miss everybody and I'm gonna miss everybody
And I'm gonna miss everybody and I'm gonna miss everybody
And I'm gonna miss everybody and I'm gonna miss everybody