the smedley log - suburban scrawl

Devouring Paste from spring into summer

Chronicling my ongoing Paste addiction…

Shuffling through the most recent issue of Paste magazine, I discovered two semi-related items.

One is the inclusion of Bill Mallonee in the magazine’s list of the “100 best living songwriters.” I generally agree with about two-thirds of the list’s selections (and the remaining third mostly comprises artists with whom I’m not quite familiar enough to say whether I think they belong). Bill, who comes in at #65, definitely belongs on any list of greatest living singer-songwriters. For that matter, so does Over the Rhine, who come in at #74.

The other item is an Edwin McCain cover of a nearly vintage Mallonee tune, “Welcome to Struggleville.” I’ve noted before that if I had given the title of this blog a bit more thought, I would have named it Struggleville, partly in tribute to Bill, and partly because the theme of the song is one I’ve long felt was a kindred one to my life, and life in general.

The McCain version takes a little getting used to for someone like me who’s been ingrained with the Mallonee/Vigilantes version. And there’s another 22 tracks from artists like Josh Ritter, Matthew Sweet (with Susanna Hoffs) and World Party.

If you’re not already a Paste consumer, and you’re at all interested in something outside the Rolling Stone/Spin-type cookie cutter music mags, I encourage you to give it a try, sample the supplemental music sampler and evaluate the aforementioned top 100 list for yourself.

[A] Hey – the OTR live CD is one of my “get with subscription” splurges. The other one of theirs I have is Till We Have Faces, which I like quite a bit. Will start listening to it once I houseclean enough to find the 3 CDs I got from Paste (as well as a couple recent purchases besides that)

[B] I’ve listened to some of the latest CD and a few days later realized a snippet of a song that keeps coming into my head from there – something like “Didn’t I blow your mind? Didn’t I blow your mind again? Didn’t I blow your mind for the 3rd time” (although probably better) I remember pulling the list of song titles (I could listen to a snippet of every song from the CD, but that’s among the missing), and none of them seem to have a title like “blow your mind for the 3rd time”. Well, one of these days I’ll find it.

[C] The friend who receives my used copies has a boss who’s rabid about Bob Dylan, so that may be a third person infected. And I just saw the blurb about Cate Blanchett being one of the “Bob”s in the movie. Which thrills me to pieces as I could be convinced to watch Cate Blanchett in near anything (I was FURIOUS when Gwynneth took what should have been Cate’s Oscar for ELIZABETH)

Will have to find and listen to when carryiing the songlist so I can figure out what I like as I hear it (and I vaguely remember hearing the Sweet/Hoffs and liking it – I had heard about that album a spell ago and twice now had it in my hand to buy and put it back)