"The music and medicine you needed for comfort"

I'm not feeling particularly festive today, despite my professed love of Fridays, but it is nonetheless time for another My Friday Faves.

I feel like I'm cheating a little bit since my last Friday Fave was music related, but music plays such an integral part in my existence. I remember the staggering moment when I first put earphones to ears and played my newly purchased 20 gig iPod -- my life threatening to never be the same. You mean I can listening to anything, anywhere, at anytime???? Whoa! Perhaps this love of music started early, my parents playing LPs while my mom was pregnant with me, a hazy mix of late 70s classics and my father's love of Mozart. In fact my middle name has its genesis in the title of popular Beethoven song.

Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over The Sea" has been on near repeat over the last week. I'm not sure why, but the fuzzy distortion of such songs as "The King of Carrot Flowers" and "10" has filled something in me that has been lacking. An indie rock masterpiece, the album was inspired by the story of Anne Frank. If that isn't brilliance then I don't know what.

Neutral Milk Hotel – Holland, 1945