Laura Stevenson - Wheel

Hearing an artist make their first truly cohesive album is so wonderful. Where Laura Stevenson’s sophomore LP Sit Resist showed that she is a gifted at writing songs and melodies, the album’s inconsistency in style made it feel a little half done. But the melodies are so great I listened to that album a ton. Stevenson’s third album Wheel isn’t perfect, but it is easily going to crack my top 10 at the end of the year. And the fact that it’s not perfect is pretty much a compliment, because that’s what makes Laura Stevenson worth listening to. She could have gone and smoothed off all the rough edges and idiosyncrasies that make her so special and aimed for a more Standard Female Alt-Folk Singer approach (for some reason I am thinking she could be a Kathleen Edwards type and though I don’t want to know Ms. Edwards because I think she’s a fine singer/songwriter, Stevenson’s got the rootsy fiddles lurking all around this album and she’s got the pipes to pull off straight-forward alt-country chanteuse for sure) and make something that was totally boring. This sounds like an album that was demanding to be made. One where Stevenson had to exhaust herself playing catch-up with, and as a result it’s got this vital thread that runs through it and almost breaks your heart. It’s got sad songs that sound like sad songs and sad songs that sound like happy songs. It’s got heart. So much heart. It’s not a masterpiece, but it totally shows me that Stevenson has a masterpiece inside of her that is going to unfurl on album four or five. It’s just so obvious. Wheel sounds like swinging for the fences. It doesn’t matter if there’s contact—which there is plenty of, by the way—it’s the effort. She’s got those intangibles all sorts of analysts talk about when they’re judging rookie quarterbacks. Sometimes you can just tell when someone is great, or going to be great, or in the middle of becoming great, and I think Stevenson is that last one. Truly realizing what she is capable of an artist, a singer, a songwriter and a musician. It’s great.

Various Artists - Beserkley Chartbusters Volume 1

Various Artists – Beserkley Charbusters Volume 1

Beserkley, 1975

Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013
Price: $1.50

I bought this four Jonathan Richman tracks because all the Modern Lovers albums we got in at the store were way to expensive. The rest of the tunes by Earth Quake, Greg Kihn, and Rubinoos are pretty much standard power pop and tend to suffer (Earth Quake especially) from the cock rock tendencies of 1970s rock n’ roll. But the Jonathan Richman tracks are fantastic. I believe the versions of “Road Runner” and “Government Center” precede their definitive release on The Modern Lovers in 1976, and considering that those tracks are timeless monoliths of pop music, they sound great any way you spin them. “The New Teller” is one I had never heard and is pretty great and helped me realize that as long as I don’t listen to huge chunks of Jonathan Richman I really truly love him. Big chunks, like that one compilation of his Beserkley years I found at St. Louis Park and could never make it all the way through, not so much. But song by song he’s wonderful. Greg Kihn’s tracks aren’t half bad, but they do suffer from being little corny (but you know, it’s a sign of the times and the only way Richman avoids corniness is because he totally embraces it).

For Jason Molina

The back catalog Jason Molina is prolific to say the least, but my favorite thing he ever released was a little bonus CD that came with the vinyl pressing of Songs: Ohia’s The Magnolia Electric Company. It’s a stolen favorite, because I was only really made aware of its existence by a tour diary John Vanderslice put up on his blog in the mid 00s that sung the disc’s praises. His entries routinely featured quotes from the album. Every single line lifted was the most sad, gorgeous, poignant thing I’d ever read.

Everything you hated me for

Honey, there was so much more
I just didn’t get busted

Right in the guts. That is a line that has stuck with me all these years and whenever I hear “Just be Simple,” whatever version, I always make sure to make the room or whomever I’m with quiet so I can let it hit me again. It haunts me over time, the way all of his songs haunt me over time. The way all of his songs are haunted and populated by ghosts and the blues. Lonely highways and the moon. Always the moon figuring prominently; a sort of mythical figure haunting the land, maintaining order in its coming and going.

Mama here comes midnight with the dead moon in its jaws

Looks like the big star’s about to fall

I have bonded with many men over Jason Molina. Our mutual appreciation is well known. We were the guys who would make a special effort to go to his shows every time he came through town. That weird looking guy with the huge eyebrows and either a t-shirt or a fancy button up western shirt with a bolo tie. Always with that huge beastly man with the curly hair rocking out next to him with a fundamental righteousness that made your spine tingle. As if his conviction gave all the songs that extra push they needed to break your heart. At their core these songs feel designed to be played solo by a sad lonely man with nothing but an acoustic guitar and the blues, but the backing band he’d found in Magnolia Electric Company his songs took on a violent power. They went from the blues to being straight up mythic. And sure Molina is dead now and his band dies with him but my memories of seeing them live all those times, just rocking out with such a beautiful purity, those memories are still so fresh and that’s where the sadness creeps in from.

Now count every rhododendron in this cool mountain light

I made more mistakes than that just tonight

So all of you folks in heaven not too busy ringing the bell

Some of us down here ain’t doing very well
Some of us with our windows open at the Southern Cross Motel

When a sad songwriter dies I feel like the instinct is to reevaluate his catalog. It’s not like any effort is required, it just becomes requisite every time you drop the needle. It’s obvious that there are much greater tragedies than the death of a man. In just this past week alone—a solid month plus since Molina’s death—there has been a marathon bombing and a fertilizer factory explosion. People die tragically every day and hopefully those people have someone there to mourn for them. I can’t help but mourn for Molina though I didn’t know him personally. His songs are his own little eulogy to himself now and while I feel like maybe some might read into them and look for a cry for help, I don’t know if Molina could have been helped. It’s a sweet concept but deep down some things are just so wrong they just eat you up and eventually destroy you. And it’s heartbreaking that Molina was eaten up and destroyed by alcoholism and I wish I could go back in Jeff Mangum’s would-be time machine and save him. We all do, I’m sure. Even if it meant giving up the tremendous catalog of blues with which he graced the world.

The Holy Modal Rounders - The Holy Modal Rounders

The Holy Modal Rounders – The Holy Modal Rounders
Fantasy, 1972
Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013
Price: $5

Sure I could have had original pressings of the first two Holy Modal Rounders albums. Some dude brought their whole discography into work. Alas, I’d rather just have their first two albums in a re-released combo package. Because it keeps me humble. Because I knew dudes who were obsessed with first printings and original pressings and I think that stuff tends to get in the way of the actual listening to music part of owning records. Anyway, though this two-disc set shares the same title as the Holy Modal Rounders eponymous debut, it’s really just the first two albums in a budget package. I’ve never listened to this band before today, but have been familiar with them. Their name pops up here and there when you talk about Americana and psychedelia, which they blend into some real harrowing, fucking weird ass shit. The whole affair is deeply unsettling. In the best way, of course. It’s kind of impossible to imagine a group like the Danielson Famile existing without these two albums serving as forebears. I have nephews now, and I feel like they’re going to grow up to be outdoorsy jock types so sometime when they start to appreciate music I feel like I should play these albums if they ever come to visit Aunt Jenny and Uncle Ian. Is it wrong that I love the idea of confusing children? I’m almost certainly going to expose my own children to weird-ass music at an early age to make sure they spend as much time on the dark path than their old man (see: solid year of high school where the song I woke up to every morning was Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff.” Never forget). Now that I’ve said how WEIRD this band is, let’s talk about how for the period this was probably some cutting edge shit. Like just totally fucking with roots music at a gut level while also churning out some kind of magnificent straight-forward renditions of traditional folk tunes. The music is just so all over the place and psychotic and drug-addled that it keeps things fresh. The harmonies sound insane, the fiddles and banjos sound like they’re going to decapitate you. But sometimes they sound like beautiful back woods Appalachian folk music. And then the realization that these two albums came out a within two years of Kennedy’s assassination and it’s really strange to think that people were this fucking weird fifty years ago when currently bands are trying to be weird like this and failing because they’re actively trying to be weird. Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber don’t even sound like they’re trying. They’re just naturally gifted at being bizarre.

Frontier Ruckus - Eternity of Dimming

Frontier Ruckus – Eternity of Dimming

Quite Scientific, 2013

Frontier Ruckus’ third long player is definitely long. Eternity of Dimming spreads twenty songs over two discs and clocks in at the running time of a feature length film. In this hour and twenty minutes front man Matthew Milia spins yarns of personal history with the sort of detail that cuts straight through you if you grew up in 1900s suburbia. Home depot parking lots, strip malls, birthday parties, bowling alleys, first loves, first surgeries, the weird nether regions of Kohls and JC Penny, etc. It is exhausting. It is indulgent. It is my favorite album of the year so far. Milia’s lyrics are a borderline stream-of-conscious flow of memories filtered through the band’s modern Americana that shows flashes of bluegrass when the banjo comes out and the grandeur of Neutral Milk Hotel when the horns and singing saw show up. The whole is a heart-wrenching and poetic batch of songs of youth filtered through adulthood. Nostalgia for a simpler time. Not for an older, simpler time when men were men or whatever, but of high school sleepovers, 90s prom dates, and heat lamp buffets. I feel like if you grew up in suburbia your experiences are rendered as a sort of non-factor because so many people have it so much harder. Or maybe that’s imagined, or maybe it just isn’t a thing because growing up in a suburban home isn’t terribly interesting. Matthew Milia sort of validates this experience and filtering it through the lens of roots music is a brilliant way of telling very American stories with very American music.

Gram Parsons - GP

Gram Parsons – GP

Reprise, 1973

Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013
Price: $5

It’s hard to find a more beautiful pair of duetters than Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. The tenderness they achieve on “A Song For You” is something outrageously special. You can tell Parsons—the son of wealth and privilege—is trying VERY hard to be a good old boy, and actually succeeding. Granted, the backing band he threw together is doing most of the heavy lifting, what with all those mournful fiddles and all, but it’s the way Parsons sells his compositions that is so impressive. He’s not a great singer in the classical sense, but it doesn’t matter because he gets across what he needs to get across. You feel like you’re slipping on his drug-addled shoes. The covers he does feel like the cement he mixed himself to bring in that legitimacy I was talking about, but his originals are what make this album special. The aforementioned “A Song for You” is one of his best , but then you’ve got tunes like “Kiss the Children” and “How Much I’ve Lied” which feel like they’re trying to sneak into the classic country & western songbook. And then there’s the obnoxious shit-kicker “Big Mouth Blues” that caps the record off, a song I relate to on a deep personal level because, like the protagonist, I can never keep my big goddamn mouth shut. Overall GP is a better record than the posthumously compiled Grievous Angel, even though the latter features most of Parsons’ best songs. This one feels more complete, though.

Loudon Wainwright III - I'm Alright

Loudon Wainwright III – I’m Alright

Rounder, 1985

Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013

Price: $1.50

 

I don’t know why the other Loudon Wainwright III album I grabbed from the stack of them at work was this one. Someone brought in his whole discography, and I picked two albums 13 years apart. And I think I did it because I’d recognized the song title “One Man Guy.” I can’t remember if I’d ever heard the song, but it was good enough for me. And Jesus F Christ has a song. Just bare bones guitar and like crippling honesty in relation to ego. And that’s the first song so it’s a promising start,  but also of course none of the rest of the album is as good as that track. There are highlights like “Screaming Issue” and the silly songs like “Cardboard Boxes” (which, if you know me, you know I’m constantly collecting songs about the agony of moving for the mix I play whenever I have to move) are clever enough. But there’s just not enough substance here. The second half is kind of a wash of blues/bluegrass/country-tinge (although “Out of this World” is pretty good) but man, “One Man Guy” sure is something.

Loudon Wainwright III - Album III

Loudon Wainwright III – Album III

Columbia, 1972
Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013
Price: $2

 

The Wainwright children Rufus and Martha are the cornerstone of my argument about the sons and daughters of famous people having the sort of opportunities normal folks don’t have and somehow their art is less valid. It’s a really silly argument. I think I just wonder whether Rufus and Martha would have become famous had their parents not been notable folk singers. The argument is silly because there’s going to be basic genetics and nature/nurture stuff that’s going to foster musical ability via growing up in a house full of music/with musicians/around musicians. So I mostly just gave up on that argument and have been appreciating Loudon’s kids’ music for years.

So now I’m listening to Loudon for the first time ever and trying to separate him form whats-his-name’s dad on Undeclared. I know Martha Wainwright wrote “Bloody Motherfucking Asshole” in his honor, so you know, I didn’t have the highest opinion of the guy going into this record. “Dead Skunk” is a weird song from my childhood. I remember my dad being pretty fond of it and maybe singing it every time we’d catch a whiff of a dead skunk on the Kansas back roads (so many dead skunks). I don’t know if that really happened, it feels right in my head though. Wainwright’s not taking himself seriously but making music that is itself not not serious is one of his most appealing traits. He’s almost a tame forerunner to Ween, who injected their songs with weirdness and humor and somehow managed to rise above the novelty factor.

Wainwright catches you off guard with gorgeously sad folky numbers like “Needless to Say” and “New Paint.” Those songs sandwich the silly, juke-joint inspired “Smokey Joe’s Café.” Needless to say, he does a great job playing with you emotions. This thing is all over the place. There’s a totally goofball jam from the point of view of a bee (“B Side,” which features the play on words “comb sweet comb,” which I thought was pretty hilarious), there’s a drinking song in the absolute most literal sense (aptly titled “Drinking Song”), and then there’s the aforementioned “New Paint” which is full of clever wordplay but at its core is about finding a good woman. The songwriting is remarkably solid, even when it’s being intentionally stupid. And while I mostly bought this as a cheap prospect I didn’t expect that I’d sit around listening to this album literally all day. All day I just dicked around, listened to this album, did the dishes while listening to this album, put off doing other stuff. It’s a good one. 

Mary Hopkin - Post Card

Mary Hopkin – Post Card

Apple, 1969

Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2011
Price: $4

For the most part, Mary Hopkin’s debut is some really cloying, folky pop. Post Card features a weird mix of covers ranging from the Russian folk tune “Those Were the Days,” a handful by Donovan, one by Harry Nilsson (the bizarre and totally out of place “Puppy Song”), and an awkward yet kind of fantastic in its weirdness version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” I can’t find who did the drums (probably because they’re buried so far toward the bottom of the mix they didn’t warrant a credit) but there are some cool (if clumsily orchestrated) beats on “Prince en Avignon.” Cool if only because they seem to be part of an entirely different song. Paul McCartney produced this album, and um, er. Yeah. Mary Hopkin possesses an average talent voice-wise and maybe someone other than McCartney (who apparently pushed for the standards that make this album really weird in a bad way) could have coaxed some more spirited performances from Ms. Hopkin. I don’t know why this record was priced so high, because it’s not rare, and it’s not good, and it’s not cool, and it’s going right on the chopping block.

Kraftwerk - Trans-Europe Express

Kraftwerk – Trans-Europe Express

Capitol, 1977 (1993 Reissue)

Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2011
Price: $4

I really have no idea why I bought this because I fucking hate Kraftwerk. OK, hate is probably too strong and “Strongly Indifferent” is probably a better fit. I’m sure there’s something to be said for synthesized electronic minimalism, but the title track makes me want to die of boredom. It’s not that I hate trains or anything. It might be that I can’t think about Germany without thinking about Germans killing Jews. That’s probably a horrible thing to think, and I’m sure the Germans have come a long way since the Holocaust and have had that horror beaten into their skulls at an early age and really turned thing around but I look at this cover with these incredibly Nordic looking German dudes and I’m like “If they’d been born like 20 years earlier they probably would have been Nazi soldiers.” And this argument is absolutely unfair to Kraftwerk, as what there doing has an importance to probably anyone who seriously cares about electronic music this is exclusively a personal hang-up I’m airing. International forgiveness is a weird thing. Fortunately, most of the songs are sung in English so I don’t have to deal with my irrational fear of the German language. It must have really blown to grow up in post-war Germany. And I do like the sparse, cold minimalism and the vocodors a lot of the time; I just can’t get gaga over this. 

New Order - Low-Life

New Order – Low-Life
Qwest, 1985

Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013
Price: $5

New Order’s full-lengths are much weirder and more inventive than their singles collections would have you believe. Or at least that’s what I think every time I put on one of their records. The single collections are still my go-to because, despite that whole thing I said about “more inventive,” they were a band who sequestered their best songs to singles. Low-Life follows their seminal Power, Corruption & Lies and comes off a bit edgier. The forlorn opening track “Love Vigilantes” is an incredibly tuneful bummer (made even sadder in Iron & Wine’s tragic and gorgeous cover) and “The Perfect Kiss” is a much more angular mega-single than Lies “Age of Consent.” It’s a frighteningly cohesive album for a band that hated including singles on their albums. I listen to the pure pop bliss of “Bizarre Love Triangle” or “Temptation” or even the gorgeous mid-album gem “Your Silent Face” from Lies and try to figure out at what point New Order surpassed Joy Division as an artistic force. Although maybe it’s best to just leave that alone. Low-Life is a display of the rough edges usually absent from New Order’s pristine singles. It’s a nice change of pace from the hit-after-hit feeling of the singles collections. 

And here's that mega sad Iron & Wine cover:

Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas

Cocteau Twins – Heaven or Las Vegas

4AD, 1990
Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013
Price: $4

Coming from the murky depths of sophomore LP Head Over Heels, Heaven or Las Vegas sounds like it’s from another planet. Like literally, music from some other world. I feel like I’m underwater when I’m listening to it. The guitars shimmer in a way that feels like the platonic ideal of “shimmering guitars.” Like the adjective was first used for this record because man oh man does this thing shimmer. “Ethereal” is another word you see whenever Cocteau Twins are mentioned and again, it’s because well yeah this is what I think of when I think of ethereal. The way the vocals sort of drift like a ghost through the shimmery guitars on “Iceblink Luck,” and the way Elizabeth Fraser contorts her voice like some deformed pop goddess. “Dream Pop” is another term that gets used a lot with Cocteau Twins, probably because this album is a sparkling example of the genre. The music still feels hazy but there’s a crispness to it that Head Over Heels didn’t have. Granted, a lot of maturing can happen over seven years. It’s sublime. Just absolutely gorgeous and mysterious. Jenny says it’s either springtime or summer night music and I’m inclined to agree. Despite the coolness of the synths there’s a sensuality to Fraser’s vocals that fills this whole thing with warmth. The thump of the bass right up front lulls you into a hypnotic, drug-like state (which is almost sadly ironic considering that Simon Raymonde’s bass was pushed up so much to compensate for Robin Guthrie’s ongoing battle with drug addiction which correlated with a certain absenteeism). The title track is one of the most disgustingly beautiful tracks I’ve ever heard. Leave it to the Scots—a group of people typically associated with a certain glumness brought on by overcast Northern Britain—to create some of the brightest pop music (I’m looking at you too, Teenage Fanclub). 

Cocteau Twins - Head Over Heels

Cocteau Twins – Head Over Heels
4AD, 1983

Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013
Price: $2

Cocteau Twins second album is loaded with unintelligible vocals, cryptic drum machines, and floats by on moodiness and a beautifully crafted atmosphere. I’d only listened to Heaven or Las Vegas before this one and as always it’s fun to play musical connect the dots. How does a band get from murky goth-tinged post-punk to ethereal dream pop creating one of the hallmarks of the genre? How would I know! There are like four albums between Head Over Heels and Heaven or Las Vegas so that’s a road I’m likely to go down. Mostly because as a rabid Cure and Kate Bush fan, Jenny is enamored with this stuff and I’m always looking for stuff to put on and both enjoy (there’s a certain guilt I feel subjecting her to say, Bad Brains or Pixies or copious amounts of John Prine and Billy Bragg). Head Over Heels had Elizabeth Fraser and Robin Guthrie functioning as a duo following the departure of bassist Will Heggie. Fraser’s vocals are psychotically great at times, especially on the intense closer “Musette and Drums.” The interplay between Guthrie’s dark complexity and Fraser’s so-damn-close-to-ethereal vocals shining through is fantastic. It's like some kind of punch drunk daydream.

The Kinks - You Really Got Me

The Kinks – You Really Got Me

Reprise, 1964

Acquired: Father in Law, Used, 2011

Price: $0

A couple years back my father in law bought three crates of records at a garage sale for $40. Upon initial inspection, I’d assumed he’d been duped. People come into Half Price Books all the time with crates and crates of records and get their cage all rattled when you offer them $5 because it’s mostly junk, the sleeves are falling apart, the vinyl is scratched and half of it is Olivia Newton John (Author’s Note: ONJ is a recurring motif in my analogies for awful records. This is almost exclusively related to the fact that my parents’ record collection featured myriad ONJ records and a bunch of awful, scratched up compilations of 70s hits. There was a copy of Revolver, but of course it was so scratched the grooves were nonexistent. This always grinds my gears, but alas, my parents’ record buying days were pretty much the early 80s and outside of punk that era is a sonic no-mans-land.  Now, whenever I’m doing buy training with a new hire and a record buy comes in, I almost always go “So it’s almost always people bringing in like, Olivia Newton John or whatever, but you’ve gotta keep an eye out for really cool stuff buried beneath all the Olivia Newton John.”) Anyway, long story er, long at this point, I looked at these three crates of records at my in laws’ house and was like “Oof.” And sure there are plenty of the usual offenders from the 70s and 80s and most of it was pretty beat up but I did end up filling half a crate with stuff that was actually pretty right on. So this Kinks record was in there and while a lot of the stuff I pulled was stuff I wanted to look up (and never did, it’s currently sitting in a crate in wouldn’t you know it, my parents’ basement back in Olathe) there were a few records I pulled to fill gaps in my collection. I have a copy of Lola vs the Powerman at the Money-go-round, and this early collection pairs nicely. That is, it’s fun to compare and contrast and see how weird and daring this band was willing to get with pop music. You Really Got Me is quintessential mid-60s white dudes digging rhythm and blues “in the tradition of other great English groups like the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five.”

The sleeve actually does the group more justice than the music. Sure the songs are the sort of sloppy wonderful you expect from the era where the bands were just on the cusp of getting really weird. The notes on the back are actually quite funny. “Ray is the leader of the Kinks. He’s 20 years old and almost six feet tall. He composes, listens politely to what the others have to say about his compositions, and then insists that they record exactly what he wrote in the first place,” it says of Ray Davies. There are also at least four references to Chuck Berry, an influence who comes across loud and clear on their exceedingly faithful Berry covers “Too Much Monkey Business” and “Beautiful Delilah.” The originals are where it’s at though. Though the sleeve notes that “what they sing is largely their own material,” only four of the twelve tracks are originals. But one of them is “You Really Got Me,” one of the most famous rock and roll songs of all time (for better or worse) and “Just Can’t Go to Sleep” is easily my favorite track on the record so there’s that. Other influences namedropped on the sleeve: Little Richard, Sonny Boy Williamson, Peggy Lee, Ravel, Gershwin, Barbra Streisand, Gustav Holst, and Muddy Waters. Other gems: “Their unconventional clothes—capes with leather accessories, which, incidentally, they designed themselves—made them well-known figures in Muswell Hill.” Of bassist Peter Quaif: “He’s the quiet one, from Devon, and a Mod (sharp dresser). Of drummer Mick Avery: “Even without drums he never stops drumming!” It’s all kind of silly. The music is rough but tuneful and when you realize these guys were 20, 17, 20, and 19 it just gets kind of embarrassing because these guys are clearly art school twerps and yet these pretty much teenagers wrote one of the most enduring pop songs of all time. And then went on to have the sort of legendary career that makes this, their first album, look like child’s play. Which, of course, it is. And also starting at $25 on Discogs which I guess makes sense this being the mono version of the Kinks US debut (released in the UK as Kinks). And now I reallllly need to dig through the rest of the records I pulled from those crates and examine my assumptions.

Stevie Nicks - Bella Donna

Stevie Nicks – Bella Donna

Modern Records, 1981
Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2011
Price: $1.50

Because my wife is OBSESSED with Stevie Nicks (are most women obsessed with Stevie Nicks?) I bought her this album like two years ago. It’s been sitting there, staring at me, Stevie with that parrot (or looking mystically through a tamborine depending on which side of the sleeve is facing me). So approaching Bella Donna I’m like “ung every song is gonna be like ‘Edge of Seventeen’ uff da” but oh man there are some jams here! You’ve got Stevie’s duet with Tom Petty “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” which more indie bands should cover (I mean really, so good). Then “Think About It” is a surprisingly soulful gem buried in the back half of the A Side. Is it weird that a grown man is listening to Stevie Nicks alone on his day off? I think I’ve just spent so much of my life associating Stevie Nicks as the young girl’s answer to all those macho heroes of young boys everywhere. Maybe Jenny has converted me, because now instead of being just flat out annoyed by Fleetwood Mac I’m seeing Stevie Nicks as this incredibly powerful figure. An embodiment of the feminine and the badass. I think really what it comes down to is how much I absolutely LOATHE the Fleetwood Mac song “Don’t Stop.” It hurts my soul.