MTV’s The Paper

I’m not naturally comfortable watching an MTV reality show — I have to draw the line somewhere — but I have to say, The Paper is improbably entertaining. (iTunes has the first episode available as a free download, which is how I became aware of the show.) It’s all the ridiculous drama of a newsroom combined with all of the ridiculous drama of high school.

Heck, it even makes me sympathetic for an editor-in-chief. Inconceivable!

Very much a guilty pleasure.

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Sesame Street – I Want a Monster to Be My Friend

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Coverville covers Pet Sounds

(I know, I haven’t been posting a lot lately: I’ve been busy at work and busy at home. More soon, I promise.)

Although I’ve been subscribing to Coverville for several years now, it can be a somewhat lightweight podcast at times, particularly when host Brian Ibbott goes with requests instead of his own musical tastes.

That said, this week’s track-by-track set of covers of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album is an amazing show and more than the sum of its parts. I’ve heard of Pet Sounds and was familiar with it in theory, but hearing even the non-hits covered on this show just let me focus on the songs themselves, and Brian Wilson’s songs just absolutely shine.

Even if you don’t normally listen to podcasts or care about the Beach Boys, just listen to this show. Great, great stuff. If there was a Grammy for a single podcast episode, this show would be a lock for a nomination.

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Liz Phair talks to Rolling Stone about EiG

You can tell the reissue is close at hand: Liz is making the media circuit. (I’ll figure out a way to write about her for the Star or CBR if you call, publicist!)

This time up, it’s Rolling Stone, the magazine that first introduced me to her back in the 1990s, when I lived in Egypt.

It seems like the music you’ve made in the past few years doesn’t have much of a relationship to the music on Exile in Guyville. What’s your relationship to that record now?

It’s coming back around again, and I don’t think it’s an accident. For the first time in 15 years, I’m not on a major, and the forces around you are different. If you asked me to do this reissue five years ago, I don’t think I could have. For a while, Exile in Guyville was something that I was running away from. When I got bashed for my pop period, it was almost like that album belonged to critics and not me anymore. They used it against me, in a weird way. I couldn’t figure out how I felt about it or how I should feel about it. Now because I feel a tremendous sense of freedom for the first time in a long time, I said, “I’m going to find these people and bring that moment back.” If you told me five years ago that I was going to hunt down [Feel Good All Over label head] John Henderson, I would have laughed in your face. No fucking way! But I did. I found Steve Albini and all these people I had issues with in the past. It was so good for me. I was able to remember who I am — not just who I was. If you don’t ever deal with your past, you don’t even know half of who you are, and that’s what I was suffering under.

You’ve been critically attacked for most everything you’ve done since Exile in Guyville. How have you dealt with it?

It did bother me. I stopped reading press because I couldn’t write. I couldn’t deal with reading about what people thought about me all the time. But how could I escape it? Everyone was like, “You suck! You don’t just suck, you really suck!” They were so angry, and I couldn’t understand what made them so angry. I reserve fits of anger for people that I know who might have done something mean to me personally. I got into it with one writer who was like, “Do you know how personal that record was to everyone?” And I was like, “Do you know how personal it was to me?”

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Lucinda Williams – Lake Charles

I’m not sure why, but this has been my decompress-after-a-bad-day song for a few years now, having replaced Steve Winwood’s “Back in the High Life” at some point after I moved to California.I have never been to Lake Charles. I don’t think I’ve even been through Louisiana, or even driven through it. Still, it speaks to me for some reason.