So I am interviewing the guys from New Order next week. Anyone have any questions they'd like answered? Email me at molly.knight@gmail.com and I'll try my best.

I know I keep harping this to death, but I swear to jeebus the Arcade Fire is the best thing to happen to music since Napster. I'm listening to Funeral for the first time in a month or so, and its just as overwhelming as it was the first time I heard it back in October. I know, I know. Blah blah. Wank wank. But sometimes I hear something that just sounds SO BIG it's hard to believe it exists within something I can carry in my purse. The music is impossibly dense, but more than that it seems to be tapping into something existensial and communal. Maybe the reason Funeral has knocked so many painfully one-dimensional hipsters on their asses is because it fills the spiritual void excavated by blind irony. Or maybe it's just really fucking excellent and that's enough.

Sometimes listening to this record is more than my senses can take. I can only think of two other albums that do this to me: Radiohead's Ok Computer and Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. There are a chunk of Tori Amos songs that choke my breathing in the same way, namely: "Blood Roses," "Sugar," Here in My Head," "Virginia," "Honey," "Juarez," "Doughnut Song," and "Pretty Good Year." I'm linking mp3s to the three she hasn't played yet this year right here:

Sugar from LA '01
Virginia from Radio Uno '02 (Ed: NOT '01--My brain is circling the drain today).

Happy birthday to my freshman R.A. Anne, who used her Stanford degree to earn admission to Harvard Law School and Business School (while I still toil away at a desk covered in CDs and beer bottles...six years later).

Anne, like Nelly the rapper, hails from St. Louis--which supposedly boasts the "greatest fans in baseball." I'm guessing that criteria of fandom was probably set by some Wide World of Sports curmudgeon who gives the most points for things like "politeness toward opposing players," "unwavering positivity," and "sobriety." "Polite" is just a spun euphemism for "apathy"--which, btw., is mk.com's official most loathsome character trait. If I were to go to root for the Dodgers while they were on the road, I'd much prefer to sit amongst melodramatic Red Sox fans or even thug Giant fans over lobotomized Red Bird patrons; it's more fun to be hit over the head with a blunt object than to be stared at blankly, obvs.