Joshua Ferris Still Loves "Yellow Ledbetter"
Joshua Ferris, who wrote one of our favorite debuts of 2007, Then We Came To The End, shares his playlist with the Times' Paper Cuts blog today, suggesting books to accompany his favorite songs. It's adorable!
"This song scares me the way a barren road at dusk with its telephone poles bent over the blacktop might scare me. It's apocalypse rock with train whistles and violins drenched in slide-guitar melancholia and it starts with some dead-earth narrator incanting, 'I said kiss me, you're beautiful, these are truly the last days.' Listen to it alone in complete darkness and try to convince yourself you're not the last living person on earth," he writes of Godspeed You! Black Emperor's 'The Dead Flag Blues.' Look out, Pitchfork!
But there is one inscrutable pick on his list: Pearl Jam's 'Yellow Ledbetter.' "It is hard to reconcile your very personal relationship with a song - private, intimate, inviolable - with the first time you hear it played from a car window ... but I am convinced there was a time when only myself and a few other avid bootleg addicts knew of this perfect, now perfectly overexposed ballad, with its sub-Lear nonsense lyrics, and for that brief spell before the world took over, I was alone with a song that moved me unlike any before it," Joshua emotes. Okay, dude. But tell us: was it in a box or a bag?