Big news: Fangio has a home. Look for vinyl and online releases forthcoming from Fayettenam Records this spring. Totally stoked about this. More details soon.

Also notable:

This has been up for a little while now, but here’s an interview I did with our old friend Anisse Gross where I’m asked about Facebook, Auto-Tune, and what kind of car I want to be when I grow up.

Speaking of the last, my Saab and I got briefly famous on the internets a couple weeks ago when we went to Detroit to participate in this. Full report over on Firebird Man, or watch me try to sell you a 22-year-old car over at Autoweek.

In Mountain Goats news, the Cemetery Gates session we did at the end of the last tour is up now and it looks and sounds kind of amazingly great.

Finally, if you’re up late tonight and you have a TV (or if you have the internet any time for the rest of eternity after that), we’re gonna be playing on Jimmy Fallon. If you miss it and you don’t have the internet, don’t worry: I’m pretty sure my mom will be taping it.

Except mine is twelve. And I don’t even claim that they’re the best, necessarily. In fact, I’m fairly certain that I haven’t even heard a lot of the best music that was created in the last ten years at this point. But these are the albums that got under my skin the most, the ones to which I’ve found myself returning again and again, the music that’s become a permanent part of my personal canon. Not counting any of the albums I was personally a part of creating in the last decade—all of which are surpassingly brilliant and together comprise their own ten-best list—and in order from most to least obvious…

The Hold Steady Separation Sunday
Well, duh.

Art Brut Bang Bang Rock & Roll
Has there ever been a more perfect statement-of-intent debut single than “Formed a Band”? Did anything capture more succinctly what it felt like to fall in love in the aughts than the single line, “So many messages to send”? The answer to both questions is a definitive no.

Rufus Wainwright Poses
The swell at the end of the title track alone would earn it a spot on this list. Debauched and despairing, reveling in the awfulness of its own unsustainability, it’s a little eerie how fully this album, released in June of 2001, prefigured what was waiting for us all. “Drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue.” Good times.

R. Kelly Happy People/U Saved Me
There’s happy, and then there’s psychotically defiant denial of the complete catastrophe that your life has become. With Happy People, R. Kelly made unparalled art of the latter. It is both astonishing and somehow difficult not to admire his Buddha-like insistence on “sending out love signals” to the “so many people walking around low on self-esteem / and so many people for no reason so doggone mean” while betraying absolutely zero awareness that the reasons people are mean to him might have something to do with the small matter of his being on trial for pissing in the face of a fourteen-year-old girl. And then there’s “Peace,” from the overtly and mostly cornily religious U Saved Me companion CD, which turns out to be a plea for lovingkindness so plaintive and nakedly emotional as to make “Imagine” sound like the manipulative treacle that it is, and might be the most unexpectedly moving song of the decade. (And yes, I did just elevate R. Kelly over John Lennon.)

The Thermals The Body, The Blood, The Machine
“It seems like every decade there’s a band that takes punk rock and turns it into something new and exciting and their own.” That’s how John Congleton, who recorded the Thermals’ latest, Now We Can See, explained his love for them to me, and we agreed that the Thermals were that band for the 2000s. The band fearless enough to sing—to beg, really—in 2004, “Pray for a new state / Pray for assassination!” and smart enough to ask two years later, from the perspective of the people whose “power doesn’t run on nothing” and who “need the land you’re standing on”—that would be us—”do you think it’s fair? / do you think we care?” In “Here’s Your Future” the God of the Old Testament foretells the consequences: “It’s gonna rain!” Utterly unstoppable.

Randy Newman Harps and Angels
This was the only album of the last ten years that both made me laugh out loud and made me cry the very first time I listened to it. And while the 2008 election seemingly rendered the wry doomsaying of “A Few Words” obsolete, the intervening year has only served to further demonstrate its author’s prescience. Our new president might’ve put a dignified face on it, but there’s no denying at this point that we are still very much “adrift in the land of the brave and the home of the free” and will remain so indefinitely. “You say you’re working harder than you ever have / You say you got two jobs and so’s your wife / Living in the richest country in the world / Wouldn’t you think you’d have a better life?” Mhm.

Nick Lowe The Convincer
If there is dignity to be found in hitting rock bottom, Nick Lowe mines every ounce of it here. Restrained, refined, resigned; heartbreaking, funny, and impeccably tasteful from start to finish. If you’ve ever been humbled by life, if you’ve ever been the author of your own undoing, if you’ve ever taken stock of your surroundings, shaken your head and thought: “I’m a mess,” then you will appreciate the sentiments enumerated herein, and this might very well become one of your all-time favorite albums, as it has become one of mine.

Grandaddy Sumday
My understanding of the conventional wisdom is that this is the disappointing follow-up to 2000’s widely-acclaimed, high-concept masterpiece, The Sophtware Slump. Whatever. These ten small gems are like The Office rendered in 4/4, only with the dial turned halfway to pathos instead of halfway to funny. No other album of this decade said more about what actual life was actually like for more people in this country: shitty office parks, corporate newspeak, monitor fatigue, big box retail, tumbleweed suburbia. “Guess who lost the ‘go’ in the go-for-it.”

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone Etiquette
Not since the ’70s heyday of Steely Dan has an artist more viciously skewered his own audience than Casiotone did with “Young Shields,” and Owen made them dance to it to boot. “Sent a letter to Mom and Dad / ‘Mom and Dad, the money’s running out’ / Got a letter from Mom and Dad / I swear to god they don’t get me at all.” A generation of twenty-somethings is left bleeding on the street.

The Baptist Generals No Silver/No Gold
A wet and mangy orphan of an album that can neither be turned away nor turned away from. Too many to count are the occasions when this has been the only thing I can find to listen to, the only music that doesn’t fill me with contempt or derision or revulsion. It is raw and real and beautiful. For years I was impatient for the follow-up, and part of me still is, but maybe this alone is enough. Maybe this is enough.

Miranda! Sin Restricciones
Remember what I was saying about being pretty sure I haven’t heard most of the best music of the last decade? I first heard this song in my girlfriend’s cousin’s car, driving around San Salvador this summer. It came out in 2005. Miranda! are from Argentina and are massive in Latin America. Subsequent albums have gotten slicker and less interesting, but this one is pure pop gold from top to bottom. All of which makes me wonder: How much more of my favorite music ever do I not even know about?

The Idorings Self-titled
Purchased in 2002 outside Shibuya Station, Tokyo, from the street performer captured in the video below. I don’t know his name or anything else about him, because I don’t speak Japanese and “The Idorings” are the only words of English on the accompanying photocopied sleeve. One of the most brilliantly fucked-up and amazing things I’ve ever heard though. Download it here and help me figure out how to get more!

Massive new photodiary from last year’s Mountain Goats tour with Kaki King now up here, kinda peters out toward the end but for the first two thirds I was feeling it. Does everybody know that we’re on tour again as of tomorrow? Dates over at mountain-goats.com, come on out and say hello. I know I always say that but I mean it!

This was the greatest thing ever.

Most importantly: the Fangio album is finished. More on this soon. For now, check out the fucking awesome Ratti goggles I scored on eBay.

Second most importantly: I’m playing a show during CMJ, October 21 at Union Hall. I’m first of four; Franklin Bruno is headlining and celebrating the official release of Local Currency, and I’ll be playing with him, too. Action starts at 7, so get there early.

Tons of Mountain Goats stuff going on, too, obviously: new album is out Tuesday and we’re performing on The Colbert Report to mark the occasion (!). You can preview the album on the Colbert site, too. Full band U.S. tour to follow in November so come out and say hello if you can.

Finally, lots of how-I-spent-my-summer-vacation type stuff over on Firebird Man, the one place I have been updating somewhat regularly over the past several months. Check it out if you share my fascination with awesome old race cars, gawdawful customs, and unlikely third world treasures.

This latest suit names the Guinness Book of World Records alongside Granger’s Index to Poetry and Fear Factor as defendants, and charges them with, among other things, invading his privacy and hurting his feelings by awarding him such sobriquets as “Jonny Sue-nami” and “The Patrick Ewing of Suing.” The slights seem to have occasioned an unprecedented burst of self-reflection, as Riches contemplates the toll the four thousand lawsuits he claims to have filed worldwide have taken: “I’ve filed so many lawsuits with my pen and right hand that I got arthritis in my fingers, numbness in my wrists, crooked fingers, I got bags under my eyes for sleepless nights suing the world…. I eat, sleep, and think lawsuits. I flush out more suits than a sewer. I’ve sacrificed my time, dignity, and prison trust account filing lawsuits.”

Such is the plight of the greatest American poet this young century has produced. For the reference to Granger’s is not accidental: however delusional he appears, Riches is keenly aware of his rightful place in our literary firmament and the ultimate nature of his larger project. His lawsuits are merely a springboard into the kaleidoscopic miasma of global pop culture, celebrity worship, infotainment, and current events delivered via perpetual CNN news ticker that makes up the divorced-from-reality reality we daily navigate. Riches is one part Whitman, one part Burroughs, and several parts French postmodern critical theorist of your choosing, only he’s doing time for identity theft. It makes perfect sense then that he would object that “The Guinness Book of World Records have no right to publish my work, my legal masterpieces. The defendants sent me threatening letters because I sued ‘Riches v. Black History Month’ in Iowa, and President Adminadinejad of Iran filed a[n] amicus in that case, [I] also got screamed at for filing ‘Riches v. I can’t believe it’s not butter’ and ‘Riches v. convicted child molesters,’ I’m in danger, and I seek a restraining order against the publication of my name. I pray for relief.”

Jonathan Lee Riches, we pray with you.

I was reminded of, and exasperated by, this same songwriting brilliance more recently when I headed down to New York City to play bass on a bunch of new Human Hearts songs, the moniker Franklin’s adopted as his 21st Century nom de rock. The thing about Franklin’s songs, and perhaps the thing that’s kept them from reaching the audience they deserve, is that they conceal much of what makes them amazing, both lyrically and musically; they’re like ingenious puzzles, seamless on the outside, wondrously complex on the inside. Working up my parts I realized again that this was truly the only way to fully appreciate them: to sit down and actually learn these songs, figure them out, bring their secrets to light. If you’re a musician, try it. If you’re not, ask a musician friend, watch as he’s driven crazy trying to figure out what’s going on, then behold the look of admiration and satisfaction that spreads across his face when he gets it. Or she, of course. Franklin’s an equal opportunity enigma.

On the drive down I reacquainted myself with maybe my favorite Franklin album ever, band or solo, 2002’s A Cat May Look at a Queen. In its seeming simplicity and directness it defies much of what I’ve said above, but here’s the song during which my girlfriend, Patricia, not a huge music person and one not generally given to overstatement in any context, turned to me and said solemnly: “Your friend is very talented.” That he is.

Download audio file (05%20Tired%20Of%20The%20West.mp3)