I just sat outside smoking a cigarette syncing the lyrics to this song in TuneWiki, which is probably one of the coolest things ever and I would like to see it become a mainstream feature on all media players, if possible. The short of it is that TuneWiki uses all that G1 or iPhone screen real estate to display the lyrics to the song playing, and they can be synced to scroll with the song. It's pretty rad. I've synced a couple songs and I will say that the experience is worth it just to learn the lyrics.

It's a shame when the lyrics are rubbish, which I am inclined to say about this Michael Penn song, but I won't. I like Michael Penn, he is kind of a guilty pleasure. He's got this neutered sort of adult pop vibe, like Chris Isaak (I have listened to Chris Isaak albums, they are interesting) and even Jon Brion (who shares a lot in common with Penn, musically), and yet I have 27 songs by him, hand picked and rated, in my iTunes rotation. I'm going to be posting Michael Penn on this site for the next four years. Better get used to it.

Michael Penn's songs are obtuse, and I didn't realize it until I synced this one. He writes poetry, or, since I hate poetry, I am just going to say that he plays to a certain school of songwriting similar to Mike Patton, but taken to the next best level. Michael Penn's songs may be relatively meaningless when you think about the song as a whole, but if you take any two lines, they will mean something, and they will sound damn good at whatever place they have in the song. He writes for feeling, not for meaning. (Mike Patton writes for sound, the words are so meaningless they almost have no feeling, but the tone of the music does it all.)

I tend to hate music with nonsense lyrics, but Penn's aren't nonsense, they're just so laden with a variety of meanings that you can't possibly pick only one.

Song Note: Instead of linking to the album this song is from, I'm linking to a big awesome collection of his music that kicks ass. You should listen to it.

Twitter Note: Twitter users will see the January 2009 Staires! playlist go up today at some point, when I get around to it. I don't expect it to be as good as the December 2008 one, though.

Site Note: I added "Tweet This Song!" links to the main page and a possibly annoying box encouraging you to "Tweet This Song!" because it would make me happy. I put up a page about how I did it with PHP.