Daily Download: "All the Wine," the National, from "Cherry Tree" EP.
One of the nice things about the SXSW Web site is that it features loads of MP3s by bands appearing at the festival for free download, many of them available nowhere else. "All the Wine" is from the National's "Cherry Tree" EP, my No. 1 record of 2004 (see the list here), and it's one of the band's best. Over two ringing, Edge-style interlocking guitars, Matt Berninger talk-sings his potent, cryptic lyrics ("I'm a birthday candle in a circle of black girls/ God is on my side") to a melody that is disjointed, elliptical and yet still somehow catchy. This song will also be on the National's brilliant upcoming LP "Alligator," due out in April.
Great literary podcasts:
"In Walked Bud"
Amiri Baraka
"The Last Days of the Suicide Kid"
Charles Bukowski
"The House on Mango Street"
Sandra Cisneros
"A Reporter's Life,"
Walter Cronkite
"An Open Heart," by The Dalai Lama
Read by Nicholas Vreeman
"Robert Frost Reads"
Robert Frost
"In Harry's Bar in Venice"
Ernest Hemingway
"The War on Drugs"
Bill Hicks
"I Have a Dream"
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"King of Horror"
Read by Stephen King
"Motherless Brooklyn," by Jonathan Lethem
Read by Steve Buscemi
"Long Walk to Freedom," by Nelson Mandela
Read by Danny Glover
"Shopgirl"
Steve Martin
"All the Pretty Horses," by Cormac McCarthy
Read by Brad Pitt
"The Bluest Eye"
Toni Morrison
"Lolita," by Vladimir Nabokov
Read by Jeremy Irons
"The Bell Jar,"
Sylvia Plath
"The Raven," by Edgar Allen Poe
Read by Basil Rathbone
"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," by JK Rowling
Read by Jim Dale
"Everything"
Henry Rollins
"Fast Food Nation," By Eric Schlosser
Read by Rick Adamson
"Me Talk Pretty One Day"
David Sedaris
"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"
Dylan Thomas
"Slaughterhouse Five"
Kurt Vonnegut
"Hooking Up"
Tom Wolfe
Audiofile logo by: Aris Blevins
