Drag City US Vinyl & CDs

Notes: If we are somewhat over-inundated with rock biographies right now, then you can trust The Red Krayola's Mayo Thompson to come up with something different. The second part of his 'After Math' series sees us catch up with a plot to smuggle a small erotic bronze out of Tirana and the subsequent plot twists and red herrings are as unexpected and bewildering as any The Red Krayloa recording.

Notes: Jim Franks is a baker and a poet who's written a love story about bread, which is to say he's written a life story about listening, learning, trying, failing, adapting, and above all, caring. Through humor, history, relentless curiosity, and refreshingly unsentimental poetry, Existential Bread teaches there are many ways to bake a loaf, just as there are many ways to live a life.

Notes: Until we have a feature film in which Bill Callahan's words are spoken by the true and deep characters who exist within the songs, the best format will be this lyric book - wait, no, the best format will always be the albums featuring the songs, since they are sung by Bill Callahan, the author and singer, in his own inimitable and completely individual fashion. I Drive a Valence, however, which spans two decades of Smog/Bill Callahan songs, is a fairly unforgettable look-see; in fact, it's a definitive-yet-concise trip through the mirror, collecting the lyrics to 70 songs and pairing them with 116 dreamy ink-wash images by the man himself.

The nuances and ambiguities within plain-spoke expression are at the exquisite center of Callahan's gift, and the plain fact of words on paper nails them down in a concrete fashion that signals eternity somehow more concretely than sounds in the air can conjure.

I Drive a Valence does this for the listener - makes him/her a reader, while putting Bill Callahan's songs on another shelf where they sit just as entirely as they do on LP shelves around the world.