A theory ...

Maybe nobody puts out records between the end of November and the end of January because you're more likely to get a positive review when the weather turns warm. I am in fact wearing shorts (okay, and a hoodie, but still) as I write this, and I'm listening to Ted Leo's new disc, Living with the Living. Leo's kind of a comfort food type of artist for me: I discovered him towards the end of my tenure in Connecticut a couple of years ago, and as much as I fell in love with Hearts of Oak and Tyranny of Distance-- to the extent that I actively considered getting the bridge from "Biomusicology" from ToD tattooed on my person ("All in all, we cannot stop singing / We cannot start sinking; we swim until it ends")-- I fell twice as hard when my life devolved into a bit of a shitstorm.

His hyper-intelligent and occasionally heart-stabbingly delightful lyrics were a balm for me, along with the music of Death Cab for Cutie and a couple other bands that shepherded me through a difficult transition, so I was mildly disappointed with his second-to-last album, Shake the Sheets. How could I not be? My favorite writing on music has always admitted to its biases, not tried to pretend that they don't exist. How we receive any new music is so heavily colored by where we're at, if you dig, that I think the best approach is to just go headfirst into where your heads at when something gets at you and go from there.

So where's my head at right now? It's warming up outside, there's still a dirty pile of snow lingering next to the warehouse across the street from my apartment, I just bought a gas grill, I've been driving around with the windows down, and I've spent half the last month away from home, half of that at SxSW and the other half in Chicago due to my mother's untimely passing. The National have a line that goes, "How can anybody know how they got to be this way?" and I think that line speaks powerfully to just how much of who we are lies beneath the surface at a depth we can't plumb actively. But we can feel the currents and ripples caused by these sunken factors, and that's where I'm at right now, kind of lounging in the shallows, up on my elbows and just feeling the gentle push-pull of that tide.

In short, it's a good time to have new music get at me, and despite Ted Leo's new disc not being nearly the record that Hearts of Oak was, it feels all right. And that's all right.

IN OTHER NEWS: Y'all should go to the Eclectone Records Showcase at the Varsity Theater this Saturday, March 31. Bob McCreedy, Big Ditch Road, Little Man, JoAnna James, Martin Devaney, Mark Thomas Stockert, Dan Israel, The Mad Ripple, John Ewing and more. The last one was just HUGE-- I had to come late because of another commitment and I couldn't even park anywhere near the place because there were just so many damn fans of Eclectone's brand of from-the-heartland American rock and country. The addition of Little Man to the roster has upped the rock ante considerably, and JoAnna James has given them a big shot of XX to their mix of X and Y chromosomes. Get on it.