A quick one from Boston

…where I’m setting up with the Hold Steady for four nights at the Sinclair. (So, technically the greater Boston metropolitan area.) I must say that I did, at one time, imagine that a life in which I was in a moderately successful rock and roll band would be a life in which I didn’t spend the morning after the show grading exams in the hotel room. Ah well, nevertheless…

I don’t know the makers of the Supercontext podcast, but they did an episode recently that was ostensibly about the World/Inferno record Addicted To Bad Ideas, but was also the kind of serious interrogation of “what was the World/Inferno phenomenon” that I’ve been hoping someone would undertake. I was moved by and highly recommend it. (I’m not just saying this because they quote me extensively.)

Some things I’ve been up to: I appeared on the podcast “Writers on Writing” and spoke to Racket about cover bands.

I was delighted as always to contribute keys and accordion to the new Sincere Engineer album Probable Claws, out in June. Two singles are on streaming now.

Last summer, I was one of “250 music insiders” invited to submit a ballot for the New York Times magazine’s “30 Greatest Living American Songwriters” feature that dropped yesterday. I had actually assumed the piece was dead, but I guess it’s a lot to put together a package like that.

I was flattered to be asked, but it was an unexpectedly stressful exercise, because such a list exists primarily to be yelled at. You end up working defensively rather than—as Maria eventually said to me—just writing down what you actually think.

And the conveners, who are no dummies, know that the use of the—it’s fair to say—extremely contested modifier “greatest” ensures that it would be. Most influential? Most “important”? Most successful? (Songwriting is a pop form, so to say, as Michael Azerrad accurately commented on my Facebook page, that the list “overlaps nicely with The 30 Wealthiest Living American Songwriters” is from one point of view simply a redundancy.) I’ll leave the can of worms that is “the asymmetrical construction of competing discourses of musical ‘greatness’” to my brilliant spouse. Even the question of “must ‘songwriting’ mean an individual or team who consistently collaborate on both words and music” is left open-ended.

Anyway, my gut reaction when I saw it was that a lot of the choices were a little obvious—but then I looked at my own list and realized I’d picked a lot of the same people, so who’s Mr. Obvious now. I had to admit I’d side-eye a list that didn’t include some large percentage of (as mine did!) Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson. (You can argue around the edges—I had Randy Newman, Tom Waits…)

Inevitably tranches of the category of “songwriting” are going to be underrepresented simply because the makeup of the voting pool, of whom relatively fewer are going to be able to speak confidently about musical theatre, art song (broadly conceived), behind-the-scenes Nashville teams, and so on.

Whatever. In the end, I wrote:

“I’ve divided my list into three parts: first, legacy songwriters, many (though not all) of whom are at least semi-retired but whose influence and body of work are undeniably central to the histories and state of American songwriting; second, still-active or early/mid-career writers who have already put together influential bodies of work; and finally, a couple of lower-profile wild card entries.”

I don’t really want to publish my full ballot—see above about getting yelled at—but I’ll post my two “wild card” entries and short write-ups, as well as my answer to the Times’ “Bonus Question: Please pick one song by one of the people you listed, and tell us about its importance and its centrality to the American songbook”:

WILD CARDS