Baby Dee - "Safe Inside the Day". Dee sent Antony (of the Johnsons) songs, thinking Antony might want to cover one. Antony said no but uh someone should put these out. And someone did. And then Bonnie Prince Billy heard them and he and Matt Sweeney played with Baby Dee in Cleveland and Bonnie Prince Billy said uh can we record you? And they did, for Drag City, on an album that was released on January 22nd.

And this is the title & opening track, a song that is hurled with so much spirit that it could pin clouds to sky and forests to mountains, that it could pin tomorrows to todays and wills to oughts. It's a manifesto and a prayer and an inflammatory writ; it's piano-keys laid like foundation stones; it's the greatest utterance of the word "safe" that I've heard in my life. Dee's day will dim yours, cast yours into half-light and make you aspire to change, growth, courage; to aspire to better things, to return again & again with redoubled spirits... until finally you lead a day such as hers, finding a tiny paradise of no goodbyes. To find a peace so gloriously hard-fought as this.

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Please Quiet Ourselves - "Color Chart". This is no more a song about colours than Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" is a song about moons, or pinks.

Started to get a little black.
Started to get red.
Came again - there was blue, there was green, there was brown.
There was silver.
Silver!
Bronze.
Gold, silver, bronze.
Bronze.
Don't forget plum.
Forget plum.
Wait a second now: there's another colour.
What about orange / makes it so DAMN special?
What about orange
makes it orange
orange
[melodica solo]

We play drums with our hands and only when it's too late pick up the sticks.

Please Quiet Ourselves are teenagers, and they're already better painters than me.

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