the road with a yellow line through it

For the last year or so, I’ve been playing once a month (roughly) at “Cover Songs Super Spectacular” at the Jade Lounge, the bar down the street from my house: people sign up in advance to sing three covers of their choice. Sometimes there’s a theme, usually there isn’t. I bring my ukulele and sing things. The first time I did it, a woman came up to me afterwards and said “you have a beautiful voice, but I think you should really think about getting therapy.” That made me realize I had to keep doing it. (Admittedly, I’d just sung “Pirate Jenny.”)

For some reason, I always like to do at least one song whose narrator is a terrible, terrible person (actually, “Pirate Jenny” is arguably one of those too). This time, all three songs I sang more or less fell into that category: The Who’s “Odorono,” ABBA’s “One of Us” (whose speaker is not a bad person when a woman sings it but definitely is when a man sings it–I like songs whose meaning changes depending on who’s singing them, too), and Momus’s “Bishonen.”

Published this week:

*A Dredd Reckoning piece on Mega-City Undercover Vol. 2: Living the Low Life

*A review of Peter Bagge’s Reset at the Washington Post

*A piece for MTV Hive on Broadcast’s Berberian Sound Studio soundtrack and some of its evident inspirations

*An interview with Warren Ellis about his new novel Gun Machine, over at the L.A. Times