And has so many strengths.īut I’m supposed to talk about the first song, and so I shall. In a way, I like Magic Dollar Shoppe far better than these records! Because it’s so unsuspected. It’s absolutely one of my favorite albums of the last year and that includes all the stuff by famous people that I have enjoyed recently, like Van Morrison’s live rendition of Astral Weeks that just came out. And with no expectations except that the result would have some great lyrics, I found myself just absolutely stunned by the album. And then I started to feel guilty, and I took the disc along in the car.
![a thousand words rock song a thousand words rock song](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d2/0a/eb/d20aeb04126858a3958215104686ce1a.jpg)
I suppose Adam sent it to me, or Hannah gave it to me and said, “Adam wants you to hear this.” I put it on the stack of things that I’m supposed to listen to, and, in fact, months went by. Hannah played me a few songs, and I sort of thought, well, this is a fine hobby.Īnd then someone sent me Magic Dollar Shoppe.
![a thousand words rock song a thousand words rock song](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/9b/3f/cb/9b3fcb7e9f655f31881ba0eb423f9e94.jpg)
I thought of Adam sort of as a very astute fan of Hannah’s and a very well read person, with a lot of opinions on things of interest to me (Thomas Bernhard, Chris Kraus, etc.), but I didn’t take the music part of his output seriously. My capacity to misjudge was much in play initially. I met Adam through Hannah, and I guess we had a fair amount in common, because he has published a novel also (which to my shame I haven’t read yet) and teaches writing (he’s about to begin a stint teaching in Beirut!). I assume he’s partly responsible for the incredible glittering surface of the Size Queens, just as he was partly responsible for the same on Hannah’s albums (she has since, without him, reverted to something more sloppy and menacing). There’s a lot of overlap here, in that Tim Mooney, who used to drum in American Music Club, played in Hannah’s “band,” such as it was, on her albums Black Hole Heaven and Faith Burns, also produces the Size Queens. This music, if one were going to attempt a thumbnail sketch, is often ballad-oriented, often features slow tempos, often is noteworthy for great singing and dramatic lyric writing, and is, as you would suspect, well, sad. I guess the first thing to say is that Adam Klein, the singer and lyricist for the Size Queens is a good friend of Hannah Marcus’s, Hannah Marcus with whom I play music (in the Wingdale Community Singers), and as far as I can tell, they emerged from the same scene, which is to say the San Francisco “sadcore” scene, which also gave us, most notably, American Music Club, and Red House Painters. Per our agreement, I’m going to write about the above song, from the album of the same name, and then you can wade into whatever song from the album you want to tackle thereafter, and we’ll just go along like that until we feel like we have dealt with the record to the best of our ability. Michael, I’ve been up most of the night worrying about the baby, and her bad hips, and I am sort of at the end of my rope, which seems like a good time to start writing about the Size Queens. We each deal with a brace of songs from last year’s very effective and inspiring release from San Francisco’s own Size Queens, entitled Magic Dollar Shoppe, an album I urge you to seek out. We were shooting for ten thousand words about the Size Queens, until Michael fell deeply in love and, simultaneously, started preparing for his fall classes back in Ontario. The following is a record review in dialogue form conducted between this columnist and Michael Snediker (with whom I corresponded about Antony and the Johnsons a couple months back), the poet and literary critic.