Matt Bell is your new God

Read it. "Ten Scenes From A Movie Called Mercy" from Emprise Review 17. Gosh this dude is good.

Pocket Review: Juliet, Naked

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

In Juliet, Naked Nick Hornby (About A Boy, High Fidelity) does what he does best: he writes about lonely people who obsess about music to assuage their loneliness. Only this time one of the lonely people is actually a musician instead of just a music nerd. Juliet tells the story of a couple of long-time lovers, Duncan and Annie, living in a decaying seaside town in the North of England, who share a singular obsession with a vanished singer-songwriter named Tucker Crowe. Crowe's final album, Juliet, is considered one of the lost greats of his generation, and his sudden abandonment of his career has made the album all the more mysterious.

The Camp David Chord & If:Then

I was in a curious headspace during the recording of The Garden in the Machine. At once I was the front man, and principal lyric/songwriter* for a proggy hard rock band and very proud of that, and on the other I was listening to less and less hard rock bands and more indie and plain ole' pop music. This complication in personal taste made my contributions to the record borderline schizophrenic, which wouldn't have been a problem if I hadn't also had such an inordinate amount of influence on the band's sound. As I just stated I was writing all the lyrics, I was creating all the vocal melodies, I was the voice, and I wrote a third of the music for the record as well**. Therefore, when I went a little off the beaten hard rock path, so too went the band's sound.