Jeremy's Summer Short List

1. The Weakerthans, Reconstruction Site. I really really love this album, why didn't somebody tell me about these guys sooner? So many great little lyrical nuggets tucked inside the corners of these tunes.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. Rilo Kiley, The Execution of All Things. I bought this album a year ago and I think I've listened to either "The Good That Won't Come Out," "My Slumbering Heart" or "Spectacular Views" practically every day since. So good.
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Seeing the Drive By Truckers without Patterson Hood at the 930 club in February. The rest of the band stepped it up, I think to make up for Hood's absence. Cooley and Shonna Tucker passed a bottle of JD back and forth, Cooley almost fell into the crowd from too much energy, and towards the end of the show they let a volunteer from the crowd come up and sing "Life in the Factory" (a Patterson song) while the band backed him up. My guess is, if that dude's making a list of his Top 5 moments of the year so far, this one's on it.
   
   
   
4. Walking into The Pug on H Street last weekend, 5:30 on a Saturday afternoon and there's only a couple of customers in there with the afternoon bartender. Friendly conversation ensues. Bartender asks me what kind of music I like, I say, "I don't know ... alt-country? Uncle Tupelo?" He finds 86 Uncle Tupelo songs on his iPod, puts those on random shuffle, finishes up his shift, *leaves* the iPod and takes off. Nighttime bartenders don't touch it and the Uncle Tupelo Shuffle plays for another two or three hours as the place fills up. Actually it was still playing when I left, so who knows, maybe that bar is now all Uncle Tupelo all the time? Awesome.
   
   
5. The alternate reality where I managed to get my hands on a single ticket to one of the three(!) shows The National sold out at the 9:30 club in May. I'm such an idiot.