Make it so, Number One

Happy Administrative Professionals Day. Hold your head just a little bit higher during your daily Starbuck's run for the overbearing cretin who pays your salary while slowly stripping away your sense of self-worth and hope for the future.

For almost 3 years, I administrated professionally (or assisted executively, depending on your choice of euphemism) for the head of artist development at a major record label. While this was my first full-time job when I finished college, it was my third job in the music industry. Even still, I had no idea what "artist development" was. It seemed more interesting than crunching numbers in royalties, so I wore my nice pants and gave wide-smiling, enthusiastic answers when I met with the human resources coordinator. She explained, with a nervous titter, that my potential boss was "a bit of a character." Yeah, well, I was just coming off a job in metal radio promotion where characters abound. Bring on the crazy.

On my first day of work, Steve called me into his office. He lit a cigarette and put his feet up on his desk. "Listen to me," he said. "There is nothing you can fuck up that I can't fix with one phone call. Nothing. So if you fuck up, and you will, I don't care how bad you think it is. Come and tell me, and I will fix it."

At the time, I took this as a clarification of the limited scope of my influence. So insignificant was I that any mistake I made couldn't really have any real consequences. But, as I would learn over the next few weeks, Steve's assessment had more to do with Steve than me. He was master of his domain. The reason I was there was because I needed to handle the annoying administrative details so that they didn't get in the way of his pressing business of Being Steve.

On the plus side, Steve was pretty self-sufficient, as executives go. He made his own calls, kept his own schedule and generally only utilized me to order his lunch (which he would put on his company card, along with mine), book his travel and creatively manage his expense report to make sure things like $400 worth of strippers for Mick Fleetwood were approved without too much quibbling. In return, I was left to my own devices to do my job of national tour marketing without much scrutiny. Steve and I developed an unspoken understanding that I had his back and he had mine. Even if he spent the majority of his day smoking behind closed doors while I was on hold with a promoter in Texas, trying to squeak out the last two Rush tickets in captivity.

Because he was 6'3", from Long Island and because he was one of those people who simply didn't give a fuck, people were wary of Steve. He was old school. He had no interest in office politics, so if he thought you were an asshole, he would smile at you and say "You're an asshole." There was not a lot of typical wink-wink, nudge-nudge music industry bullshitting involved. I can understand why human resources was snickering to itself when they sent me off to work for him - clearly they thought he would make me cry inside of two weeks. While there were days when he did irritate me to no end, Steve was really the best boss I've ever had. He respected the fact that I was good at my job, even if he hadn't the faintest idea what I did all day. He just knew no one was complaining to him and interrupting his afternoon nap.

The thing about being an executive assistant is that your influence, at least inside the office, isn't limited at all. The reason executives even have an assistant is because there are things they need to get done that they don't know how to do. Knowledge is power. For all their 6-figure salaries and far-reaching influence, there are moments when you realize the balance of power isn't as off-center as you thought.

After one of the many "restructurings" at the label - the next of these would liberate both Steve and myself to the greener pastures of artist management - we were all packing up to move to a different floor in the building. I had been listening to the whine of a tape dispenser coming from Steve's office all morning as he boxed up all his plaques and assorted office flair.

I was discussing lunch options with another assistant when suddenly the empty tape dispenser came flying out of the office and landed down the hall by the trash disposal.

A minute later, Steve appeared. "Fucking shit," he said by way of explanation. He pointed down the hallway. "Fucking thing is out of tape."

I maintained a straight face, against all odds. "You do know you can put a new roll in one of those things, right? You keep the dispenser and just put more tape in."

He was impressed. "Oh yeah?" He went to retrieve the dispenser from the trash.

Later in the day, I found him cleaning his glass coffee table with furniture spray and his oak desk with Windex.

I miss Steve, I really do.

Just Saying: iTunes = 1, Logic = 0

Some thoughts on today's iTunes homepage:

The Staff Favorites section features Michael Bolton, ABBA and Barry Manilow. Maybe the irony train has finally pulled into that station, or maybe this goes a long way towards explaining why we can't get placement for any of our bands. They just don't like those dirty longhairs.

Lady Saw's new album features a track called "No Less Than A Woman (Infertility)." Everyone needs an anthem, I guess.

After considering the wide breadth of my musical taste, Just For You recommends that I might also like Lindsay Lohan, Teddy Geiger, and a techno reworking of "Walking In Memphis" - which, to be honest, is pretty outstanding.

Buy a Barbie pink iPod nano for your Mom! iPod - $149.00 (plus shipping). Engraving - free. Countless, maddening hours spent on the phone trying to explain to Mom how an iPod works - Priceless.

If found, please call

"I just had my faith in humanity restored," Mark said when I answered my phone. This happened a few weeks ago.

"How's that?" My own faith in humanity is never more than dubious at best.

He said that he'd left his camcorder on the subway, displaying all the practical responsibility that's to be expected of any professional musician. For anyone who has even cursory knowledge of public transportation, the general assumption would be that Mark is pretty much fucked. Thou shall not leave thy shit on the train or said shit shall be stolen. Who actually thinks that someone would find an item of any value and say, "Well, hey now! This isn't mine, and I could probably sell it to my cousin Frank who fences hot property. But I really should find a way to return it to it's rightful owner"?

Meet Mark, optimist at large. The MTA has been aggressively promoting it's new Lost & Found hotline of late, with cute little drawings of all the various things that the MTA thinks you might lose during your commute. Like, you know, your pet cobra.

So Mark went down to the lost & found office. Contrary to the laws of logic, the MTA Lost Property Unit gave Mark back his camcorder. He either had seriously good karma coming to him or we've been miraculously transported to an alternate universe where people in NYC don't all but steal your iPod right off you to sell it for crack.

I tend not to lose things. I was the kid who wrote her name on all her school supplies, even the 99-cent plastic ruler, and kept an ever-vigilant eye on every one of her Matchbox cars. I've managed to hold on to every cell phone I've owned for the last 10 years without dropping it in a toilet or leaving it in a hotel room in Ohio or any of the other reasons why all the guys in any of our bands need to replace their cell phones weekly.

Of course, there are exceptions. I've had stuff forcibly taken from me at gunpoint. Occasionally things just disappear. For the most part, though, any time that I've lost something, it's been a direct result of my own stupidity.

When I was 13 or 14, I went with my mother to Circuit City to look at car stereos (for her, not for me). I was wearing those nylon mesh basketball shorts, which was a mistake - and not just for the obvious, sartorial reasons. Basketball shorts don't have pockets, a functional necessity that designers have even seen fit to incorporate into eveningwear these days. Because I was of the mind that there could be something at Circuit City that I might want to purchase (jumper cable? air conditioner?), I tucked a folded $20 bill - the equivalent of 4 paid hours working at my tedious job at the library - into the waistband of my shorts. This was both a) stupid and b) very obviously stupid, as opposed to bad choices that aren't really evident until after the fact. No, this was just your garden-variety, straight-up dumb. Needless to say, there came a point during my wanderings through the audio section of the store when I realized that my $20 was gone. My mother called me a moron three times in the car ride home.

I used to have a ring that I really liked. It wasn't expensive; in fact, I think it was from H&M. But I got a lot of compliments on it. A couple of years ago, I wore it to a Def Leppard show in Boston, and the drunk girl next to me couldn't stop talking about it for about 20 minutes. As a matter of fact, I got to thinking that she was going to kick my ass in the parking lot after the show and take it. The Def Leppard fanbase has a violent streak, despite all their appearances that they just want to rock it (yeah). That same fall, I was at the the Mercury Lounge for a showcase of yet another thunderingly average band that Atlantic Records had signed. In the bathroom, I took off the ring to wash my hands and left it on the sink. It only took about 5 minutes of watching an underwhelming stage show for me to realize I didn't have it on, but when I went back to look in the bathroom, it was gone. I suspected the rather large, goth-looking girl myself.

Most crippling of all, I once lost my wallet. Not to be confused with the time I was mugged because, I don't know about you, but conceding to a semi-automatic isn't so much a loss - I'm just going to chalk that up as an investment in my personal well-being. When I was in college, I carried one of those shoulder bags without any kind of closure - things fell out of it all the time. Stupid, yes, but moving on. During one of my women's studies classes, I must have kicked the bag under my desk and knocked my wallet on the floor. I didn't even realize it until about an hour after the class was over. Frantic, I ran back to the lecture hall and crawled on my hands and knees under all the desks. It was in vain. You never realize how much of your life you keep in your wallet until you lose it. Concert tickets, business cards, receipts - all gone. I didn't even think of it in the frenzy of cancelling my bank cards, but I had also been keeping my high school IDs in my wallet. They were the things I regretted losing the most. Not because it was an especially flattering picture (it wasn't) or because I had fond memories of high school (I didn't), but they were pieces of my past that I could never replace, unlike my Food Emporium rewards card. That's when it dawned on me exactly what caliber of idiot I was, stopping to consider how some things increase in value only when they're lost. That Joni Mitchell, she wasn't just blowing smoke, was she?

It's not just Mark's recent camcorder incident that made me revisit the ghosts of things lost. Earlier this week, for reasons equally as stupid as nylon mesh shorts or leaving expensive electronics on the A train, I effectively lost a friend who was really important to me. If he ever speaks to me again, I will consider myself lucky, but there are some parts of the relationship I know I can never replace. There is no lost & found for someone's regard. Consequences such as these are a necessary price of flagrant stupidity, and that's what makes this particular loss so much harder than a piece of cheap jewelry or some scrawling in a notebook. People don't simply disappear one day into some vortex, like single socks that make it into the washing machine but don't come home from the dryer. People have to be relinquished in a moment of blind carelessness. And I have no one to blame by myself.

Losing something is a one-sided pain, unfortunately. What's lost is unconcerned; it goes on to a new life. It will get found eventually by someone else who happens to be in the right place at the right time. Maybe someone who better deserves to have it.

PETA is through kidding around

That's one way to make a point.

It's the little moments that mean so much

12: 45pm. The phone rings.

It's my mother. She is driving to her hair appointment in Hendersonville.

"Sarah. Have you ever had one of those days where everything you touch is just fucked?"

A life, in writing

Today is Helene Hanff's birthday. She would have been 91 and probably on her second martini by now.

I first met Helene in 1997, about 2 months after she died. She literally fell on me. It was the end of the day, and I was shelving my last cart of books in the 400 section - languages, for those unfamiliar with the increasingly archaic Dewey Decimal System. The stacks were taller than me, and as I reached up to make room on the already packed shelf, one of the books came loose, hitting me smack in the forehead. It was a slim paperback, old and dusty, the spine held together with clear tape.

Working in a library is monotonous, even on a good day. (On a really exceptional day, the police show up and arrest the local flasher, but that's an entirely different story.) More often than not, I gave in to the distraction of browsing through random books whose covers intrigued me. Generally I preferred the 100s (philosophy & psychology) and 200s (religion) because they had the books about serial killers and astrology, respectively. On this particular day, I was looking to procrastinate before I started to work in the 500s (science - not as fun as deviants and multiple homicide), so I picked up the little book that escaped from the shelf and started flipping through it. It was 84, Charing Cross Road.

It's a simple thing on the surface - the book is a collection of letters, and it's barely 100 pages. Helene Hanff was a struggling writer in 1940s New York City who wrote to the Marks & Co. bookseller in London with regards to finding cheap copies of obscure or out-of-print books. The correspondence eventually lasts 20 years, until Frank Doel, the store's manager and her intellectual soulmate, passes away. They never met face-to-face. As I sat on the floor of the 400s, I felt the burning of impending tears as I finished the last letter, from Helene to her friends on their imminent departure to London - a place she has dreamt of since she was a little girl and is yet to go: "If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much."

On Easter Sunday in 1998, I did exactly that, feeling the same sense of pilgrimage that I'm sure Helene felt on her first trip to London. It was a bright but bitterly cold day. I walked through Trafalgar Square to Charing Cross Road. The street is winding and narrow with a seemingly never-ending stream of second-hand bookstores and other unglamorous retail. Two older English ladies asked me if I was lost. I sheepishly told them the address I was looking for.

"Oh, the bookstore," one of them said and smiled. "It's just another block. It's still there, don't worry."

It was still there, barely. Empty and all but boarded up. The address was painted in simple, stark white letters. But just above eye level, implanted into the brick, there was a plaque: "84, Charing Cross Road. The booksellers Marks & Co. were on this site which became world-renowned through the book by Helene Hanff."

When I went back five years later, the storefront was gone. In its place was a Pizza Hut. I like to think that they hung the plaque somewhere behind the register, in between the posters for Stuffed Crust Pizza and Cinnastix, but I really couldn't bring myself to go in and find out. Some things are just too heartbreaking to confront directly.

Eventually, 84, Charing Cross Road was made into a Broadway play and a movie, which is pretty amazing for the fact that the letters were never intended to be published at all.

"I never stop being awed by the incredible things that happen to me," she wrote later.

After reading 84, I tracked down everything Helene had ever written, which amounted to another four books and a handful of magazine articles. I felt an intense kinship with her immediately. Not only did she, like me, have an almost giggly affection for all things English, she came to New York with the idea that she would be a playwright. I spend an ungodly amount of money on an education to be a filmmaker. Also like me, she was outstandingly bad at it. So spectacularly inept, in fact, that it was enough to fill her first memoir, Underfoot In Show Business. She managed to write about the business of being a bad writer in such a way that it made me wonder why anyone in their right mind would want to write plays for a living. Writing about not being a very good playwright was so much more intriguing. Writing about life in general began to fascinate me.

Helene was born in Philadelphia, but she's always been my favorite New Yorker. My first apartment on the Upper East Side was only nine blocks from where she lived most of her adult life. I used to walk down 72nd Street on summer afternoons, passing her building and feeling as though I was living a parallel life in many ways. I envied the way she had been able to translate her seemingly ordinary experiences into stories - Letter From New York was a collection of her scripts from the BBC Women's Hour radio broadcast. She had been given 15 minutes every month to capture a snapshot of life in New York City for the English listening audience who simply couldn't imagine real people living in such tall buildings. She was tasked with humanizing an entire city.

Helene gave me a lot of things, not the least of which was an unwavering belief that real life could be made funny or heartbreaking or compelling all in the way the story was told. She showed me the kind of writer that I want to be.

"I wrote my life." She says it almost as though it was a realization that genuinely surprised her. She wrote a lot of things: plays, TV scripts, children's books, letters. But her best writing really came in the way she described her neighbors and their dogs, the difficulty in hosting Thanksgiving dinner in a studio apartment, and how it feels to take the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building when you're deathly afraid of heights. I imagine she was every bit in person the way she was in print - short-tempered, funny, unpretentious. One of my great sorrows in life was that I couldn't be one of the people she took tea with in the lobby of her building. She was continually amazed that people wanted to meet her at all.

In her last book, she begins with her accidental introduction to the work of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who was responsible for much of her love of English literature: "Q and I first met on a summer morning when I was 18, at the main branch of the Philadelphia Public Library where I'd gone in search of a teacher."

Sometimes the teacher finds you. Sometimes she hits you right smack in the face when you're finishing up your cart of 400s. How fitting.

Smash Hits: Revisited

A couple of years ago, I ran across Ill Mitch. I'm happy to see that he's still going strong, complete with an entertaining video section. Something about painfully broken English and a bad Russian accent never fails to translate (haha, you see what I did there?) into unintentional comedy. Fast and danger, indeed.

Therefore, in the grand tradition of wicked flow from the Eastern Bloc, you please enjoy:

Inspired by a true story

In my last year of college, I enrolled in a creative writing class with much the same zeal as the one-legged man signing up for the ass-kicking contest. I write astoundingly terrible fiction. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration. My dialogue and characterizations aren't too bad, but I have the damnedest time coming up with good stories. And seeing as making up stories is generally the crux of writing fiction, I knew I was in for a long semester. I wasn't usually in the habit of academic masochism, but the class I'd really wanted to take - Memoir: The Art of Writing Life - was full.

I went to my first creative writing class, not feeling very creative, and sized up the 10 or so people who were no doubt majoring in basket-weaving or psychic healing. What I failed to realize when I registered was that the class was offered through the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, the segment of NYU reserved exclusively for the dippy, the navel-gazing, and those who were independently wealthy enough not to need Real Jobs. I liked to joke that I went to barely-college in the film program, but this was a whole other populous of people who were required to do nothing but convince a panel of advisers that doing yoga and taking pictures of clouds entitled them to a degree. At least I had to do my time taking classes with -ology attached to them.

"You're going to be working on one cohesive piece this semester," the professor explained to us. "You're not limited by genre, but I want you think in the long term about creating a complete work." Oh, well, thanks for those parameters. I work much better with boundaries.

Right around this time, I was in the middle of the singular most destructive relationship I've had the misfortune of perpetuating. Thus far anyway. I'm sure there's worse out there somewhere and that I'll no doubt stumble into it eventually since, according to certain medical professionals, I have a lot of issues. But at the time I was spending a lot of time hanging out in the deepest, darkest hole I could have imagined. I wrote about it meticulously in my journals because that was my reflexive outlet and because my friends were fucking tired of hearing about it. I recorded entire conversations, every phone call I didn't have to beg for, the time I was so hysterical on my kitchen floor that I literally couldn't breathe. I wrote it all down in cold, unflinching detail. Part of my self-punishment was to rub my own nose in it.

When I got home after my writing class, I pulled out my journals from the preceding two years and went over the documentation of my bad choices. It was actually pretty compelling reading, if you don't mind the occasional indulgent tangent of self-pity and lots of use of the phrase "fucking asshole." Despite the fact that I wasn't really concerned with clever turns of phrase or witty juxtaposition at the time I was writing, I'd managed to capture a story. It just happened to be true. I was sort of the reverse James Frey without even knowing it. I guess I could have embellished things with a police chase or a healthy heroin habit, but that seemed a little excessive.

"We can just pretend it's fictional," I said to my professor, when I told her I was going to transcribe my journals rather than conjure up some bullshit. She was skeptical. "Look," I explained, "I really wanted to take the memoir class. Cut me some slack. You don't want to read my fiction, I promise you." She finally relented and told me that it had better be good.

"Why did you decide to use the diary structure?" someone asked when I read my initial synopsis out loud to the class.

"These are actually my journal entries," I replied off-handedly. Everyone stared at me. "Everything really happened. Is happening. Anyway, yeah, let's just pretend it's not real."

Initially this idea was born out of sheer pragmatism. I often tried to make one piece of writing serve two purposes when I could, like when I managed to knock out my term papers for Avant Garde Literature and Studies In Feminism by deconstructing the portrayal of female characters in Brecht's Mother Courage & Her Children. Less work for me in the long run, and given that I was regularly afflicted with bouts of procrastination when it came to assignments, I figured that I would be keeping up with my journals anyway so why not kill two birds with one harrowing tale of angst?

Once a week, we'd have a roundtable reading. When it was my turn, I read several entries, including the ordeal of crying on the kitchen floor. Everyone was supposed to receive a constructive critique from the rest of the class after sharing their work. Normally I do about as well with criticism as with shooting guns, which is to say not very well at all. But for some reason, in this class filled with directionless intellectuals who were judging my capacity to deal with a horribly dysfunctional relationship, I managed to take everyone's comments in stride.

Writing things down makes it seem a little more like someone else's life. It makes it easier to separate myself, to remember that there wasn't much I can do to control events that were already in motion. If I could write it all down, more or less the way it happened, the record could stand on its own. Maybe I could learn a lesson, the way you see someone else trip on a curb and say to yourself, "Oh, I'll watch out for that." It might as well have been happening to someone else. I often tell myself that situations such as these have very little to do with me in the end. I'm not a variable or at all necessary in the equation. There is never a choice that I need to make - things are never offered to me, simply awaiting my signal. Things are often taken away, though, quite without my realizing it.

Maybe that's a cop out. I like to pretend that I exist in a glass box, pounding on the walls and shouting soundlessly when I feel like I'm not getting my way. So I convince myself that I exist in a void - nothing I say or do impacts anyone. No one takes anything to heart. I'm not a blip on anyone's radar unless I crash in a spectacular display of flames and wreckage on their doorstep. At which point they politely sweep up the remains, put it in a box and mutter, "Ugh, what a mess."

"Um, first of all, I'd like to say I think it's really brave that you're doing this," said one girl who was writing an overwrought epic about vampires in medieval France. "But, um, I think you need to focus more on explaining why you - um, the narrator - was upset enough to have that kind of reaction, to be so out of control? It seems a overly dramatic in the context."

I looked at her blankly over the top of my manuscript. "Duly noted. I'll work on it." Why had I been so upset that day? I thought. How can I better dramatize the reasoning behind the closest I ever hope to get to a nervous breakdown?

While it was strange to essentially have my real life and my documentation of such come under literary scrutiny, it became less surreal as the class wore on. Every week I would show up, describe how I felt in my darkest moments to a roomful of strangers, and listen to feedback about how I could make my personal drama more palatable for an audience. By the time the semester ended, I can't say that I handed in a cohesive, complete work. It could only be documented up to a point. I had my manuscript bound cheaply at Kinko's and turned it in. To be completely honest, I can't remember what grade I got. At least I passed. Everything passes.

I've found myself writing more recently - in several capacities - than I have in a long time. Yet again I've started to compulsively write down events, conversations, what someone told me I said because I wasn't so much there when it was happening. Johnnie Walker practices a highly effectively memory wipe more often than not. Things fall apart, people leave (sometimes before they're really gone), I say things I regret, and every night I write it all down. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

So maybe I can just pretend, when needs be, that this is not my life. This is some melodrama that I am simply watching. This is someone else's heart that's breaking. After all, there's nothing special about that. But sometimes it's a good story.

Five Albums You Should Have Liked All Along (A Cautionary Tale)

We've all been there. You're minding your own business, losing a little bit more of your soul to the corporate machine, when you hear the faint strains of quality music drifting over from the next cubicle. Suddenly the otherwise competent, saavy person next to you says, "Hey, I'm really getting into this Frou Frou album - have you heard it?"

At which point it is your right - nay, your very duty! - to laugh in their face or, at the very least, subject them to a withering eye roll. Not necessarily because you are lucky enough to have Captain Calamity on your side to hip you to this stuff 18 months before it gets its turn through the VH1 meat-grinder, making it safe for popular consumption. You must mock this person so they learn not only the important lesson of keeping up with decent music but that you never admit to anyone else that you just bought an album that came out 5 years ago. Denial is half the battle.

Friends don't let friends experience this kind of shame. Get with the program. I won't tell if you won't.


Duncan Sheik / Daylight (2002)
Kind of par for the course, really - Atlantic Records manages to completely mishandle the most commercial-sounding album the guy has ever made. Yes, even moreso than the one that spawned "Barely Breathing" and made it a veritable standard in dentist offices across the nation. I know a lot of people got forever turned off when that song reached ubiquitous levels because, yeah, we get it - you can't find the air. And even if you were able to avoid that, he started churning out that Buddhist-inspired weirdness and getting all tedious and low-fi and making Low look like balls-to-the-wall rock and rollers. But for one shining moment, he got his shit together and wrote some fantastic, unconventionally hooky songs about grown-up relationships, personal reinvention, conversations with Satan, and the strange experience of seeing someone you used to sleep with posing naked in a widely-distributed publication.


Ricky Warwick / Tattoos & Alibis (2003)
When you stop to consider that Ricky Warwick used to be the frontman for The Almighty and wrote songs called "Meathook" and "White Anger Comedown," it makes it all the more amazing that he released a solo album that's a) largely acoustic and b) capably articulates the sentiment of "Here's to your enemies / Be sure that you wish them all the best from me" without the benefit of crushing guitars or the slightest hint of irony. I only became aware of his existence because he was opening up amphitheater shows for Def Leppard...playing acoustic by himself, which is pretty ballsy in front of a crowd that's drunk on Miller Lite and waiting to rock out to "Pour Some Sugar On Me." The first time that I saw him, I had a good laugh over the fact that he started his set with a song called "Mysterioso." Because, seriously? The chorus was "This world is so mysterioso." The burly Irish metal guy was making up words. But I saw a lot of Def Leppard shows on that tour, and at some point that damn "Mysterioso" song got catchier and catchier. Made-up words aside, Ricky Warwick is an excellent lyricist for a man who wears a cut-off denim vest.


BT / Movement In Still Life (2000)
Sometimes it takes a really pretty white boy from Maryland to put some soul back into electronic music. At times, BT is sort of like Trent Reznor after a heavy dose of Zoloft and some excellent highlights. After spending a lot of time trying to make people dance (see also: "do ecstacy in a field") to Sarah McLachlan and Tori Amos - often with mixed results, since college-girl angst + breakbeats = awkward - he released his own album and created a varied soundscape of hip-hop, trance and spoken word (M. Doughty loves those English girls with ghetto names, by the way). Ironically enough for a producer/DJ, it's best realized with his own vocals on the melancholy epic "Shame." Sometimes it doesn't have to be all about pigs and shit and fucking, eh, Trent? Just putting that out there. Sometimes the people just want to get funky. NB: I was kind of torn, to be honest, between this and the 2003 follow-up Emotional Technology. As a matter of fact, get both.


Mike Viola & The Candy Butchers / Falling Into Place (1999)
For those times when you find Fountains of Wayne too self-consciously irreverant and Elvis Costello too much of an asshole, Mike Viola has all your retro-influenced, tie-wearing indie-pop needs covered. As a matter of fact, he rocks a lot more than both of the aforementioned and injects a lot darker edge. Who doesn't enjoy a healthy dose of self-hating with their Wurlitzer? Then again I would probably hate myself a little too if my primary claim to fame was handling vocal duties on "That Thing You Do!"


Moke / Carnival (2001)
England, in general, rocks pretty hard.

Except when we're talking about Mika, in which case it swishes extravagantly and sings in falsetto.

This is not Mika.