Vetoed:

1. “Shine Blockas (feat. Gucci Mane),” Big Boi.
2. “I Got More than a Feeling,” Mad Mix Mustang. (Black Eyed Peas vs. Boston)
3. “Young Hearts Spark Fire,” Japandroids.
4. “Whatcha Say,” Jason DeRulo.
5. “Drumming Song,” Florence and the Machine.

Not:

• “100 Days,” Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings.

Jones was my brother’s suggestion. Well played, sir.

“The Thanks I Get,” Wilco. It’s surprising how few Thanksgiving songs there are. A search of my iTunes library reveals just one song about gratitude (“I Will Be Grateful For This Day,” an unremarkable Bright Eyes B-side) and just one about thanks: this one, from our friends at Wilco, and the thanks being offered are completely ironic. Still, the song has its pleasures. For one thing, it’s better than anything on the record it was left off of. And it’s even more fun live, when the crowd joins in with Tweedy to sing “we can make it better.”

In any case, I’m off to California for the weekend. Happy Thanksgiving!

The cover of David Sedaris’ new live LP is funnier than any of his most recent stories.

“Swim Until You Can’t See Land,” Frightened Rabbit. We pick up with Scott Hutchinson where we left him, on the post-apocalyptic shore of a relationship that left him pondering suicide, wondering where he goes from here. In this euphoric song, he realizes he can’t go back to where he’s been. Instead he wades into the unknown, resolving to keep going forward until he can’t find his way back to where he’s been. It’s the impulse that makes us finally delete that phone number we’ve been using to send those pleading midnight texts. Texts we send even though we know, in our wrecked exhausted hearts, that we’re never getting a text in return. To anyone who loved The Midnight Organ Fight, this is the hard-won happy ending we’ve been waiting for. Damn if it doesn’t feel good.

(This track available on iTunes; hear two other great-sounding new songs here.)

And this year’s American Music Award for most awkward simulated BJ goes to … (photo via)

“Diamond Heart,” Marissa Nadler. It’s getting late! You should go to bed. And this is the song that should be playing as you drift off to sleep: striking, haunting, lovely.

Zadie Smith (with a hand from Virginia Woolf) has a smart take on the advantages of each form. Worth quoting at length:

A bad novel is both an aesthetic and ethical affront to its readers, because it traduces reality, and does indeed make you hunger for a kind of writing that seems to speak truth directly. But I also feel, as someone who just finished a book of more or less lyrical essays, that underneath some of these high-minded objections, and complementary to them, there is another, deeper, psychological motivation, about which it is more difficult to be honest. In “The Modern Essay” Virginia Woolf is more astute on the subject, and far more frank. “There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay,” she writes. “The essay must be pure – pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.” Well, yes, that’s just it. An essay, she writes, “can be polished till every atom of its surface shines” – yes, that’s it, again. There is a certain kind of writer – quite often male but by no means exclusively so – who has a fundamental hunger for purity, and for perfection, and this type will always hold the essay form in high esteem. Because essays hold out the possibility of something like perfection.

Novels, by contrast, are idiosyncratic, uneven, embarrassing, and quite frequently nausea-inducing – especially if you happen to have written one yourself. Within the confines of an essay or – even better! – an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing representation of other people, plot), no absences, no lack. I think it’s the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you’re generally looking into is the self.

Personally, I think if you’re going to torture people this days, you’re going to need Animal Collective, Beach House, St. Vincent’s Actor, Vivian Girls and Brazilian Girls. Also Slayer.