Its a Bird! Its a Plane! Its a Disappointment!

Jess and Kate were having an overwhelmingly High Fidelity moment the other day. Minus the Beta Band and Marvin Gaye exaltations. But with some sweeping and deeply felt resolutions about the state of music.

Here's the thing: there is nothing more tragic than an album you love being destroyed by a live performance. Okay, this is possibly a lie, Hutus and Tutsis, etc. considered, but for the music enthusiast, its certainly a bit true.

At least 2/3 of the ladies of TMC had scarring experiences of exactly this sort this past Saturday night. At approximately the same time that Andrew Bird was slowly, slowly subverting all the catchiness of his best melodies in twisted, tortured jamming at the 9:30 club, Spoon was managing to prove that vocals and rhythm are - shockingly - rather important to music making. Unfortunately the indie-darlings of Gimme Fiction et al chose to prove this by only having decent guitars, their failings made all the more apparent as they followed the Roots and surprise guest Lupe Fiasco at the University of Chicago's spring concert, both of whom have most definitely mastered rhythm n' vocals. As for Lauren, we can only assume that the sweet warblings of the Scissor-Tailed Flycatcher, state bird of Oklahoma, did not disappoint.



Don't get us wrong - we love live music. Jess has single-handedly seen every band that has ever existed in concert twice, and enjoyed most of them. Its just that some records are better left in the studio.

To lighten the mood, a fun Marvin Gaye fact: he was simply Marvin Gay until he added the e in an homage to his hero, Sam Cooke.

TMC returns from May Sabbatical

Touch My Clickwheel, or at least Jess, has returned from the May Sabbatical. Lauren has still never joined the TMC blog and is forever banished from the internet. However, banishment is not really necessary since Oklahoma doesn't really do the "internet," as they call it. Kidding. We love you, Lauren. Kate, the other TMC co-host, is missing in the Midwest. Will she come back to DC? Rumors suggest so.

But back to music, Touch My Clickwheel is here for this summer. I haven't settled on a timeslot yet, but I'll let you know. I was in the radio station today, because I needed to use a computer and this song was playing Martha Wainwright's "Whither Must I Wander". It's actually a Robert Louis Stevenson poem of the same title from 1896's Songs of Travel and Other Verses which was then set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams in his 1903 collection, Songs of Travel. Interestingly, the song was written for a baritone voice.

Buy Martha Wainwright's self-titled album here.