It's been a good year for the roses

I can hardly bear the sight of lipstick on the cigarettes there in the ashtray,
Lying cold the way you left them, but at least your lips caressed them while you passed,
And a lip print on a half-filled cup of coffee that you poured and didn't drink,
But at least you thought you wanted it, and that's so much than I can say for me.

The two things I love most about North Carolina: (1) You can smoke inside, and (2) with weather like this, you don't have to.

Speaking of love affairs with the South: I have to admit that if you put together how much Setting the Woods on Fire and the Oxford American love Southern music, it would probably amount to more love for Southern music than I have. But not by much.

You have to find a lot of honky-tonk love in your heart if you're going to forgive Elvis Costello for putting out a country record that's actually really good, and plenty of people can't. About a year ago I was chewing the fat with the record shop boys and one of them said to me that Almost Blue "tries too hard," that Southern music has to be "un-self-consciouss." I agree with him that "there's nothing more hateful than some joker from Alexandria, VA, slapping a Confederate flag on his SUV," but the more I listen to country music the more I think that ironic distance is right at home in it. How many other genres have an entire canon of meta-songs? "The Buck Starts Here (With Hank Sure to Follow)," "Jones on the Jukebox and You on My Mind," "I Just Started Hating Cheating Songs Today," etc.? When the postmodernists discover country music, they're going to have a meta field day.

Almost Blue is a genre exercise, but is that so wrong? EC's angry young man persona is one strong breeze away from outlaw country anyway: hard-drinkin' ("Tonight the bottle let me down") and sweet loving ("and let your memory come around"), with a bad despairing streak. All he's missing is Jesus.* Lots of good MP3's over at STWOF, so listen to "Stranger in the House" and tell me EC ain't got Nashville in his blood.

As for the Oxford American Music Issue, Marc Smirnoff's liner notes win this week's Luc Sante "Bobbing for Meatballs" Award for most incomprehensible metaphor in a music review: "If getting your thumb jammed in a window or door were any fun, it would sound like this." (He is also the runner up, with, " You could chase the Sparkletones around a dense swampland and not get close to them — even if they had to lug their instruments about in a blazing afternoon. They just want it more than you.")

*This is a bigger problem than it seems; every good country star cuts a gospel record, ideally after a born-again experience sets him on the path away from the bottle and onto the straight and narrow. But EC's still got time.