I’m back in Alabama. Good trip, all told; given that it all involves my family, I’ll not write about much of it at all. [That's not an I'm-afraid-to-write-about-my-family thing, that's an I-know-you-don't-care thing. And if you do, you'll ask me when you see me next.] But if you want to ask here, well, the comment form’s at the bottom of the page.

Something I will mention, though, is my new obsession with M. Ward. I mean … I’ve had Transistor Radio for some time now, and I did get Transfiguration of Vincent just recently, but when did I go nuts? Well, let me tell you…

When I’m away from home, I just don’t sleep well. Part of this comes from the fact that I need some noise in my room at all times while I’m sleeping. I’ve written about this before, and I generally make this happen at home with my XM radio being tuned to some talk station [almost always ESPN Radio or WLW] with the volume down low. On the road, though, this doesn’t work, so I take my iPod nano with me. I have the lanyard for the 1G nano, and between that and a set of Griffin Ear Jams, I can sleep while wearing my iPod on the lanyard and only rarely pulling a bud out of my ear. When I wake up and find one dislodged, it’s certainly not much effort to put it back in.

So anyhow, suffice it to say that the first night had me select the “M. Ward” smart playlist that I’d put together for the iPod, and … well, it didn’t come off of that playlist the first two nights. The third night it did, only to go only to playing ToV over and over again. I … can’t get enough of this album right now. The last time I spiked on an album this hard, it was Sufjan Stevens’s Illinois. I remember reading Pitchfork’s review of Transistor Radio and reading what I then considered heresy:

His last record, 2004’s magnificent Transfiguration of Vincent is at once sprawling and intimate. It’s grown on me like strangling vines in the last year and I can play it anytime around anybody without a worry. [Transistor Radio] is just a little tiny bit less perfectly imperfect than that album, but it’s still got all the warmth and gentle disorganization of its predecessor– with a few more oomphy tracks standing in for Tranfiguration’s (sic) most introspective meditations.

Ain’t no heresy. Before mid-December, I was poised to declare Transistor Radio the best album I’d acquired in 2006. That honor will now belong to Transfiguration of Vincent. In his review of Transfiguration of Vincent, Pitchfork’s Joe Tangari writes:

Some time in 2035, I’m going to pull this album out, and it’s going to sound just as good as it does now. There’s something running through it that broadcasts timelessness and defies genre constraints– quite a feat, considering how M. Ward’s previous outings had pegged him as a modern-day alt-country troubadour, tied to tradition despite promise that suggested he might one day transcend its confines.

Exactly. I fully expect that this is an album I’ll buy five or more copies of and just give to people over the course of the next year.