We pause in the midst of this summer heat wave for the caress of some of the greater love songs of the year by Bill Callahan, Camera Obscura, the Moore Brothers, the Horse's Ha and Stuart Murdoch. And not all of them are about masturbating.
by Alex V. Cook, Music Editor
first published: July, 2009
approximate reading time: minutes
If there is a better song about a failed masturbation session released this year, I haven't heard it.
We pause in the midst of this summer heat wave for the caress of some of the greater love songs of the year by Bill Callahan, Camera Obscura, the Moore Brothers, the Horse's Ha and Stuart Murdoch. And not all of them are about masturbating.
Bill Callahan - "Two Many Birds" from Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle (Drag City)
This song starts innocently enough, a breakup song repeating
the line "too many birds in one tree" over a slowly unfolding piano and drum
kit in the back of the song. Slowly, though, the song is like that tree, probably
like the relationship as well, fills up with birds: "O black bird over black
rain burn among them," looking for a rest in this saturated tree that continues
to chirp and rustle with their presence becoming one with the general sense of
a tree. That is when we step back from the
tree to notice a single bird, then the first and a second, then those two and a
third and so on until we are bewildered with the wholeness of trees and birds. If you listen to the last minute of the song
as its real soul message gets revealed word by word: "If/If you/If you could/If
you could only..." -and it's worth checking out to see what the final message is -
you will understand.
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is an odyssey from the backwoods bars and small-town dives to the swampside dance halls and converted clapboard barns of a Louisiana Saturday Night. Don't leave Heathrow without it. His first book 
