I’ve got new music lined up for weeks now. If you pay close attention to what I’m doing here—and if you do, I’m a little worried —I’ve been trying to listen to a new studio release and several bootlegs as I work down a big backlog of the latter. This week, Bryan got an Amazon.com gift certificate from our longstanding [caedmonscall.net] account, and he gave it to me, forbidding me to spend it on other people. [This, as I was about to send him something with it. ] So I got a bunch of new music that’ll keep me groovin’ for a while, and when I wasn’t patching software and diving through server logs yesterday, I was working on bootlegs. I’ve got a plethora of new music at my disposal into August.

• Joe Bassett’s Nothing Hurts Like the Truth.
  
• Ben Folds’s 1990 solo demo tape.
• 13 Nov 1996 [Santa Monica, CA, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco.
• 14 Apr 1997 [New York, NY, USA] concert bootleg of Elliott Smith.
• 4 Mar 2005 [Chicago, IL, USA] concert bootleg of Jeff Tweedy.
• 6 Feb 2006 [Lexington, KY, USA] concert bootleg of Son Volt.
• 15 Jun 2007 [Philadelphia, PA, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco.

Last week was pretty darn good:

• Andrew Osenga’s Letters to the Editor, Vol. I. It’s an EP. It was also made in under two weeks. I rarely praise EPs so effusively, but … heck, it’s great. Four-and-a-half stars.
  
• 30 Aug 1995 [Dallas, TX, USA] concert bootleg of Wilco. For the era of the recording, it’s surprisingly good. Three-and-a-half stars.
• 12 Oct 2003 [Austin, TX, USA] concert bootleg of Fountains of Wayne. Freakin’ excellent. Four stars.
• 10 Jul 2004 [Wallingford, CT, USA] concert bootleg of Ben Folds. It’s good bootlegs like this that make me want to buy more of an artist’s work. Three-and-a-half stars.
• 1 Feb 2006 [Athens, GA, USA] concert bootleg of Son Volt. Three-and-a-half stars. I’ve said it before, but these early 2006 bootlegs have sold me on the new era of Son Volt—and that took some doing!
• 28 May 2006 [Rockville, MD, USA] concert bootleg of Blues Traveler. I still don’t like much of anything they’ve done post-Bobby Sheehan, but they do sound pretty good. Three-and-a-half stars.
• 23 May 2007 [Cologne, Germany] concert bootleg of Wilco. Mehhhhhhh. The taper noted that, being a stealth-rigged show, it wasn’t going to measure up. He was right. Two stars.