le pistolet est dans ma bouche maintenant

As Steve Martin used to say: Those French!

Sure, you may have France stereotyped as the land of snooty sommeliers, Arab riots in les banlieux and those cheese-eating surrender monkeys who tried to stop the U.S. from launching our wildly successful invasion of Iraq. But this corner of Old Europe is also the newest fountain of Caulfieldmania, according to this posting from a Francophone blogger named "Tu vas voir ailleurs" (which is French for "You are going to see ailleurs"):

The Caulfield Sisters est un trio féminin américain qui se veut être la métaphore musicale de ce que représente Phoebe, la petite soeur d'Holden Caulfield, dans le roman culte de J.D. Salinger, L'Attrape-Coeurs. Soit une lueur d'espoir un peu floue au milieu d'un océan de mélancolie. Le résultat : ce long morceau, My Lazy Muse, au climat étherée et paroles glaçantes qui consolera plus d'un fan de Mazzy Star en attente de nouvelles discographiques d'Hope Sandoval. D'autres morceaux ainsi que la session KEXP du groupe sont disponibles en téléchargement gratuit sur son site officiel.

What in blazes is Tu Vas parlez-vousing on about? Google's translator tells us:

The Caulfield Sisters is an American female trio which wants to be to be the musical metaphor of what Phoebe represents, the small sister of Holden Caulfield, in the novel worship of J.D. Salinger, the Catch-Hearts. That is to say a a little fuzzy glimmer of hope in the medium of an ocean of melancholy. The result: this long piece, My Lazy MUSE, with the climate étherée and words glaçantes which will comfort more than one fan of Mazzy Star on standby of discographic news of Hope Sandoval . Other pieces as well as session KEXP of the group are available in free remote loading on its official site.

Nice to see the world catching up to the glories of Les Soeurs. It will ease the discomfort as we remain on standby of discographic news of Cindy, Mary and Kristin.

By the way, Caulfields fan Fudd went to see Look It the other night and offers this brief review:

Very nice set, but a little short. Several nice songs, one blistering, kickass rock and roll number. Unfortunately Cindy's vocals weren't loud enough. But it was well worth the trip out. Is this material going to be recorded and released?

We can only hope.

sure wish you'd take a swing

Even more news about the exploits of Her Wheelerness: "Just a quick note to let you all know that Cindy will be performing with Look It on Friday, December 2nd at Pianos. Show your support and come on out for a great night of music!"

Pianos' calendar says the Looky-Loos play at 10:30. Blythe Hollow, Sing Sing and Haley Bonar play earlier if you wanna make an evening of it. Come along and bring your jukebox money, or at least the $10 cover.

the sting will never last

If wishes were horses, or cliches were original, we'd all be galloping to buy Caulfield Sisters CD's right now. But today we have the next best thing, the first electronic missive in months from As Irmãs:

Hello Dear Friends

We sure have missed you!!! Just wanted to let you know that the Caulfield Sisters
cover of the Smiths song "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want"
will be appearing on the upcoming compilation HIGH SCHOOL REUNION a tribute to those
great movies from the 80's (Breakfast Club, Repo Man, Fast Times etc..). We'll be
a appearing with the likes of Frank Black, Kristen Hersh and Matthew Sweet just
to name a few. The record is available for pre-order at the link below:

http://www.americanlaundromatrecords.com/highschoolreunion.html

On a personal note, Caulfield bass player extraordinaire Mary and her husband,
welcomed the arrival of daughter Eleanor Louise in late July. The Caulfield Sisters
will be back in action this winter. We are currently writing new songs and rehearsing
those old ones..... We miss you all.

Best,
Cindy, Mary and Kristin

The Sisters also got yet another plug today in Billboard, which might as well rename itself The Caulfield Weekly the way it's been going on and on about them:

Originally planned for a September release, the compilation "High School Reunion: A Tribute to Those Great 80s Films" will now arrive Dec. 1 via American Laundromat and Face Down Records. ... Beyond previously announced contributors Kristin Hersh, Lori McKenna, John Strohm and the Caulfield Sisters, the compilation also features songs from Frank Black (Iggy Pop's "Repo Man," from "Repo Man"), Matthew Sweet (Tom Petty's "American Girl" from "Fast Times") and Dresden Dolls (Psychedelic Furs' "Pretty in Pink").

The Billboard story also includes the usual drollery from Frank Black:

"I think it came out good except for one line," Black tells Billboard.com of his contribution. "I couldn't find an actual copy, so in the middle of a [Pixies] tour I got the lyrics on the Internet, which I in turn was correcting from memory [laughs]. There's one line where I couldn't remember how Iggy did the timing. It's like an extra line, so I just inserted it my own way, so it might sound dumb."

Dumb? Nah.

The Sisters also get a passing mention on Spin.com, which apparently hasn't had time to get that cover story finished yet.

Anyway, congratulations to all involved, as well as Eleanor Louise. Looks like Christmas will be coming in, uh, December this year.

and i say dance motherfuckers

Don't you hate it when blogs go silent all of a sudden? When the news and commentary just stop without even a fare-thee-well, leaving that big ol' stale August 21 date staring you in the face like a blinking 0:00 clock on the over-the-range microwave?

OK, not all blogs surely -- I mean if a certain self-styled muckraker or a particular apologist for racist internment camps were to go into an extended, Salinger-esque state of seclusion, society as a whole might be the better. But it's been my misfortune to allow this shrine to musical wonderment to sit on this compost pile and sprout weeds, what with the three hurricanes, the week-long power outage, the family insanity and whatnot.

But I'm back, because the Sisters are -- at least on vinyl, or whatever it is they make CD's out of. ("On plastic-coated aluminum" doesn't have the same ring, unfortunately.)

The occasion: American Laundromat's long-awaited High School Reunion CD is finally coming out in December, apparently, and the label is taking preorders from newsletter subscribers and past customers. Here's the final track listing:

John P. Strohm -- 'Somebody's Baby' (Fast Times at Ridgemont High)
Dipsomaniacs -- 'A Million Miles Away' (Valley Girl)
Matthew Sweet -- 'American Girl' (Fast Times at Ridgemont High)
Blank Pages -- 'Turning Japanese' (Sixteen Candles)
The Bennies -- 'Weird Science' (Weird Science)
AM -- 'Don't You (Forget About Me)' (The Breakfast Club)
Lori McKenna -- 'In Your Eyes' (Say Anything)
Kitty Hawk -- 'If You Were Here' (Sixteen Candles)
Nova Social -- 'Little Bitch' (Sixteen Candles)
The Modifiers -- 'Love My Way' (Valley Girl)
The Atomic Hep Cats -- 'Bring On The Dancing Horses' (Pretty In Pink)
The Commons -- 'Moving In Stereo' (Fast Times at Ridgemont High)
The Dresden Dolls -- 'Pretty In Pink' (Pretty In Pink)
Kristin Hersh -- 'Wave Of Mutilation' (Pump Up The Volume)
The Caulfield Sisters -- 'Please Please Please Let Me...' (Pretty In Pink)
Underdog -- 'I Melt With You' (Valley Girl)
The Wading Girl -- 'Danke Schoen' (Ferris Bueller's Day Off)
Frank Black -- 'Repo Man' (Repo Man)
PC Muñoz -- 'I Go Crazy' (Some Kind Of Wonderful)
Bastards Of Melody -- 'Within Your Reach' (Say Anything)

Saving the best for last, the label also has a clip of the Sisters doing that Smiths cover. As far as I can tell they do Morrissey and company justice, in that classically melancholy Caulfields-ish fashion of theirs. Can't wait to hear the whole thing.

So what ever happened to Look It, the Caulfield Child and the rest of the bunch? Have the Sisters returned from their hiatus yet? Any word on that seven-inch?

Now dance!

held a knife to my throat and told me to choose

Much to say, much to say, but not a lot of time to say it. So here's the Reader's Digest version, Mac:

1) Look It, everybody's favorite Caulfield Sisters/Home/Mercury Rev/Company spinoff band, is playing a second, "secret" show this coming Friday (i.e., August 26) headlined by The Comas at an NYC club called Otto's Shrunken Head. (Is it just me, or is it sometimes a bit too difficult to tell the names of the clubs from the names of the bands?) As someone in the know said lately, "a tremendous buzz" is springing up around this show, so make your plans now.

Sadly, I may have to miss this one, even though I will be a mere two hours away in Philadelphia -- or, as The New York Times recently all but annointed it, Brooklyn-On-The-Delaware. Sorry to burst your bubbles, Timeseans, but Philadelphians are not in the habit of referring to our city as "the Sixth Borough" -- Philly may be crime-ridden, trash-strewn and on a depopulating demographic spiral, but we've never regarded it as an appendage of New York. On the other hand, we'd be happy to take all the cool NYC bands you care to throw at us. So if the Sisters ever felt like playing here, they'll be most welcome.

(Actually, the Times article was pretty cool -- much better than it would have been back in the days when Howell Raines was sending Jayson Blair around the country to make up shit.)

2) I'm really digging Kristin's other band a lot these days, and hope to post more about them soon when I can gather my thoughts properly. Also been turning my ears toward the Mendoza Line (some of whose songs fall into that "holy shit, I can't believe I never heard this before" category), and the Purrs, who are getting heavy airplay on KEXP these days. (This latter band may ultimately prove to fall into the "more competent than inspired" category, but their song "Taste of Monday" has wormed its way into my brain quite nicely.)

3) Have any plans for 3 to 5 p.m. on Sundays? Cancel them! Instead, your soul needs you to be listening to "After the Polka", that brilliantly revived free-form radio show by Cindy's ex-bandmate Jenny Juristo Morrison. You may have lost hope that broadcasting greatness still lives; you may have come to doubt that oddball segues and not quite carefully controlled sound levels and a restless musical longing, together with a sympathetic ear for the unkempt and off-kilter, can indeed rewarp one's time-space continuum (and for the better, I might add, minus all of Stephen Hawking's annoying indecision about black holes). But you'd be wrong. Plus, you get to hear Jenny's kids playing and yowling adorably in the background.

If you happen to miss a Jenny-cast, you can download a podcast of the shows afterward at the same link. But listening live is more fun, ain't it?

The "T" of time falls through the trapdoor of history, throws its hands in the air, and becomes the letter "Y." Hmmm ... where's that from?

photographs of people i don't know

With another month left in the postpartum Sisters drought, those of us looking for a Caulfields fix will have to settle for other means. Fortunately, some new photos have surfaced from last November's show at Sin-e -- and this time the shooter is a guy named Brian, not Jasper.

Whatever happened to Mr. Coolidge, anyway? He takes some amazing concert photos, and he deserves credit for spreading the word about the Sisters back in those dark, pre-Laundromat days. But he seems to have moved on to other pastures -- so go Brian.

In other news: If you're anywhere near Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., later tonight, ya might wanna swing on down to Bard College, where Kristin's other, other, other band Gloria Deluxe is doing its operetta-about-amnesia Accidental Nostalgia. Quoth the Bard: "The group transforms itself effortlessly from a torchy house band in a Berlin lounge to the last act in a Nashville bar and back again." And who can resist that?

this is the country western bar of the dead

Hey, who says Kristin is the only Caulfield Sister who can be in a dozen bands simultaneously? According to these grammatically challenged folks, Cindy has gone off and formed a side project with members of Home and Mercury Rev. The new band is called Look It, apparently:

While waiting for Caulfield Sister bassist Mary Guidera to adjust to new Motherhood and preparing for Cindy Wheeler from The Caulfield Sisters seems to to have accidentally formed what some indie rock nerd types can only call a super group; other types might just call it a rock band. They call it LOOK IT. The band "LOOK IT" Features Cindy Wheeler on guitar/accordion/vocals - Andrew Deustch (singer/guitarist of the band HOME) on keyboards/vocals - Suzanne Thorpe (Mercury Rev) on amplified flute and Dave Janick (Company) on Drums. Their first performance will be Saturday 07/30th 8pm at Thrash in Williamsburg.

Sounds mighty cool.

I haven't heard any comments on how this performance went down. Then again, the Caulfields message board has gone amazingly silent (except for one "Cindy's hot" comment) since all the Pee Shy discussion underwent the knife during the Great Purge about a month ago. Yeah, I know I promised to stop bitching about this publicly, and I sort of understand the reasons why. But in retrospect, it seems kind of counterproductive when you're a band looking to get noticed (and their label) to quash the fans from talking about you or your earlier incarnations -- especially when that involves tossing entire pages of comments into the memory hole, as opposed to freezing the discussion or moving it to a more appropriate venue. Especially when all the posts were praising you. Fans' good will is a valuable commodity and should not be squandered rashly.

Again, I understand why it happened. I just think it was misguided.

Anyway, enough about that. I truly hope all is well with the band, the label and the new Caulfield Child.

"The freedom to think as you will and speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery of political truth...the answer is more speech, not enforced silence."
-- Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

Update: D'oh! Leave it to me to not check the official site before posting. The text quoted above (about Look It, not the Brandeis quote) is a garbled version of something Cindy posted on the news section. It's also accompanied by a photo of a young girl (Cindy?) hoolahooping and pointing. Hence the name, I suppose.

Cindy also adds, amid all-caps excitement: "LOOK FOR THE CAULFIELD SISTERS TO BE BACK IN ACTON IN SEPTEMBER!!!!"

Truly, truly great news. Rock on, y'all.

my tongue has turned black from tasting what's not mine

The Caulfields camp has made a new convert. It seems the proprietor of the Music Cherry blog was looking for something with a Mazzy Star/My Bloody Valentine vibe, and boy, did s/he find it:

The Caulfield Sisters definitely carry on the tradition of Mazzy Star and other similar bands. The music is drifting and washed-out (and I mean that as a compliment), and the vocal work is wonderfully relaxed and lilting. Oddly enough, Cindy Wheeler reminds me of Shirley Manson, even though the music is nothing like Garbage. She shares the same throaty lower register sound, and I can also sense a bit of the same rock attitude, even if directed to different ends. The music is like a drug-induced dream, but it does not lack intensity.

On the other hand, can Shirley Manson play an accordion? I don't think so. And based on the lyrics of "Smoking Gun" alone, I'm not sure Cindy likes it when it rains.

gonna send a paper airplane to you

I just couldn't let this evening pass without welcoming Tropical Storm Cindy to the mainland.

Now, Dennis, will you please go the fuck away!!!

some whispered news in darkness

So I'm watching U2 playing on Live8 right now and wondering why, oh why, the Caulfield Sisters aren't up on that stage.

But now I know: Mary is preggers! Yes indeed, a Caulfield Daughter or Son will be arriving in about two weeks. (If it's a daughter, will they name her Phoebe? Or Esme? Franny?)

Since even music must yield to parturition, the Sisters are on a break. But Cindy in all her Wheelerian splendor will be doing a solo show July 30 at Trash in Williamsburg.

find the sun when there's no you

"First Bridge of Summer"
by the Caulfield Sisters

I just tried to cross the first bridge of summer
but the rain was in my eyes
and the mist it hid the towers

I can't tell my east side from my west side
from my east side from my west side

And it's hard to do,
find the sun when there's no you
And you can tow my car away
It doesn't matter 'cause I'm gonna stay
It doesn't matter, I'm not leavin' anyway

I just crossed my eyes to try and see double,
to multiply my troubles
I could times them all by two (one, two),
hide my mood in the bright and blue

I just crossed my fingers 'cause I was lyin'
when you said I was tired of hidin'
tired of being so goddamn law-abidin'

Want to throw a brick through your window,
just to see how far that it might go

And it's hard to do,
find the sun when there's no you
And you can tow my car away
It doesn't matter 'cause I'm gonna stay
It doesn't matter, I'm not leavin' anyway

And it's hard to do,
find a sun that's even when it's due
Ooooooooh Ooooooooh
I'm not leavin' anyway
I'm not leavin' anyway
I'm not leavin' anyway
I'm not leavin' anyway

Pee Shy held its farewell Tampa Bay concert at the State Theater in St. Petersburg on Friday, August 2, 1996. Soon thereafter Cindy Wheeler, Mary Guidera and Jenny Juristo moved to New York City to pursue their major label music career, which ended in mid-1998 when the band broke up shortly after releasing a promising second album (Don't Get Too Comfortable, which led off with what might be considered Cindy's defining song, "Mr. Whisper.") A year later in Central Park, Cindy wore a red dress as she married Sam Fogarino, the record buyer for a second-hand Brooklyn clothing store called Beacon's Closet -- and soon to be known as the drummer for Interpol.

Somewhere around this time is the genesis of "First Bridge of Summer," a song of new love, a new city, belonging, surrender, hope, and the anxious uncertainty that hope can bring.

It was one of the first batch of three songs that Cindy and Mary (musically reborn as the Caulfield Sisters) released on the old mp3.com sometime after January 2000. (The others were "Dumbfound You" and "Shackleton," a since-vanished solo number by Mary.) It might be the happiest song Cindy has ever written, featuring maybe her warmest vocals -- though, as we'll see, it's not without a twinge of wistfulness.

It has a bright, shimmery poppiness on the surface, amplified by some undulating effects-pedal thing that accompanies almost all of the song, giving it a mood utterly unlike anything Pee Shy had done. (Nor does it sound much like anything the Caulfield Sisters have done subsequently.) I have to admit that this song turned me into a puzzled monkey at first. I missed the accordion, which I mistakenly thought was what set Cindy apart as a musician; I misunderestimated the pop surface; I just didn't like it all that much, preferring the dark, brutal survival instincts of "Dumbfound You." (Given the name of this blog, are you surprised?)

I was so wrong. "First Bridge of Summer" is a wonderful, amazing song, maybe my favorite Caulfields song of all time.

Do they still play it live?

If not, it might be because it serves as a painful memory of happier days -- especially if, as I'm totally guessing based on no firsthand knowledge, Cindy wrote it during the period when she was falling in love with Sam and Mary was doing the same with Peter Katis, who may or may not have engineered this song at Tarquin Studios in Bridgeport, Connecticut. (I wish I'd saved the explanation of this song that Mary posted on mp3.com, in which I believe she described both herself and Cindy as "lovesick" during the time in question.) This might be true in a larger sense as well, depending on how you interpret these words:

but the rain was in my eyes
and the mist it hid the towers

Are these "towers" just a generic reference to New York City skyscrapers, or are they specifically the Twin Towers? If the latter, this song becomes fixed on its own emotional Ground Zero, on the time before we knew to call that location by that name -- those unscathed days before America had suffered mass murder on its own soil, and before a terrorist attack handed a dubiously elected president the pretext for unprovoked war; back when New Yorkers, and we as a nation, still possessed some now-lost essential sense of ourselves.

All the more reason to keep this song alive.

Even without any geopolitical undertones, this song gains its strength from a marriage of geography and emotion. Cindy is still trying to find her bearings in an unfamiliar place ("I can't tell my east side from my west side," not even to mention the fact that she's so shaky on the location of this bridge). She's anxious about an absence she knows or hopes is only temporary ("it's hard to do, find the sun when there's no you"). Yet she's found a place where she knows she belongs, hence her bravado about letting her car be towed away.

And let's examine the iconography of the car, shall we? Throughout Cindy's songwriting with Pee Shy we saw the car come up again and again, often as a metaphor for desperation, self-destruction and self-loathing. In "Stigmata," the narrator "slammed on the brakes just to smell of the rubber," throwing her car into a (presumably fatal) spin simply to make her partner yell "I love you." In "Yellow Race Car," a woman speeds at night on darkened streets with no headlights, illegally crossing the double yellow lines until she finally crashes into a tree and "her head took a good bashing" (Is she dead? We don't really find out). In "Ode to Nic," the woman struggling to quit smoking keeps "thinking about driving at a high rate of speed," along with binge-drinking, binge-eating, passionless sex and the sabotaging of her relationship. In her poem "For the Game" she wants to run over the man she loves with a 1978 Monte Carlo. In "Bathroom Floor," another ode to binge drinking, she mistakes the bottle for "a throttle," a means of controlling the speed if not the direction of her life, and winds up vomiting and lying on the cool tile.

Why all these cars? Maybe because cars are deadly, killing more Americans than almost anything else. Cars also can insulate us from the people around us; that's why people become abnormally brave while driving, cutting off and shooting the bird to folks they wouldn't dare to look at cross-eyed in a bar. They can aid passivity, transporting us without much initiative on our part ("don't wake me up until we get there/I want to sleep, I want to dream with the windows down," from "Four Miles").

Cars also are, for the desperate, a means of escape -- the role they famously play in so many Bruce Springsteen songs, although he also showed us how frequently this escape is an illusion (for example in "The River" and "Racing in the Street"). The escape becomes even more fleeting, a mythic glimpse of a non-existent better life, in one of Cindy's most perfect Pee Shy songs, "Smoking Gun," featuring the most perfect of all possible couplets:

Why is there a big car in the sky?
Why's the wind always make it pass you by?

So we have Cindy writing songs about cars for more than four years ("Stigmata" dates from early 1994), but then with the Caulfield Sisters one car shows up exactly one time -- in this song -- and here she is, daring someone to tow it. She makes yet another escape in "Fine," but this time she's walking, and she's confident of where she's going.

Maybe this is simply a matter of moving from Florida, where cars are a necessity, to New York City, where you can get around fine without them and keeping a car is expensive. Yet there's more going on, I think -- certainly in this song. Not only does walking require you to move yourself and take responsibility for your destination (as in "Fine," and in the part of "Smoking Gun" where the woman gives up her illusions and walks away), but in "First Bridge of Summer" renouncing her car is Cindy's way of surrendering any possibility of escape. She has found the place she wants to be, the person she wants to be with, and she's staying.

The rest of the song finds Cindy embracing the possibility of couplehood ("to try and see double, to multiply my troubles"), giving up her outlaw ways ("being so goddamn law-abidin'"), bursting through barriers to pursue intimacy ("Want to throw a brick through your window, just to see how far that it might go").

Then comes the longing for the one who's absent -- one who will probably return, we hope, but at this stage of the relationship it's hard to tell. (I can't decide: does the lyric here change to "find a SONG when there's no you"?) But this isn't heartbreak. This is longing filled with hope, a sweet memory of the sun and a desire to see it shining again.

Finally, the song ends on Cindy's promise of permanence. It didn't come true, sadly, but that all comes after the song is over.

I can't say enough for this song musically, either -- here, for the first time, Cindy and Mary really become sisters, with Mary's backup harmonies and loping bassline defining the song as surely as Cindy's glittering guitar and warm-as-honey lead vocals. That moment when Cindy sings "times them all by two" while Mary sings "one, two" is so captivating it ought to be bottled. The drummer here is Bill Orrico, formerly from Pee Shy's latter years, so this also might be the closest we get to hearing what Three Wheeler sounded like. In any case, it was the last that most of us would hear Cindy and Mary together until they released Songs for Phoebe three years later.

Can you tell I'm kind fond of this song? Maybe that's why tonight, after my dinner of ribs, shrimp and two Hurricane Reefs, it was all I could do to drive around town, listening to it and singing along at full volume.

do you remember the days when the rains came?

Deep in the country, amidst the large white house and barns surrounded by fields, forest, and lake—not a house or a human within shouting distance—a lonely daughter, at the distant bottom of a triad, longed for company. Animals and pets abounded on the pretended farm, but regular society eluded her outside of school, a half hour’s bus ride from home; hence the arrival of "Judy."

So begins "Judy," one of a collection of essays on imaginary friends in the Spring 2005 edition of the New York artsy-type magazine Esopus (that’s Issue #4, the one with the melting ice cream that kind of looks like a turd on the cover). Its author is the enigmatic, approximately 60-year-old Elizabeth Hope Cushing of Cambridge, Massachusetts. As you are no doubt aware, Ms. Cushing is perhaps best known as a generous benefactor of local environmental causes, as a chronicler of the people of Lynn, Massachusetts, as well as of the town’s images and, needless to say, its trees (yes, that’s correct: trees) -– yea, even as an authority on preservation and whatever landscape architect Arthur A. Shurcliff had to say about it; as someone who has served on the occasional advisory council here or there; even, one might say, as an aficionada of fine upholstery restoration.

This would all be well and good, perhaps a footnote in early 21st century short-form imaginary-friend literature, were it not for one happy artistic/musical accident: Ms. Cushing’s essay has become the occasion for yet another wonderful song by our very own Caulfield Sisters.

Here’s the deal: The magazine asked readers to submit essays about their imaginary friends, and then it asked selected musicians to pick an essay and write a song about it. (And what splendid taste the magazine showed in asking the Sisters to take part. The essay writers are an interesting lot, too –- they included Alan Sparhawk from the band Low.)

What the Sisters did with the story is magical. Over Kristin’s spare, metronomic beat comes Cindy’s strumming and a minimalist yet inventive bass line from Mary and, finally, Cindy’s voice, reverbed into a warm glow, a shimmering like the air over hot asphalt seen from a distance in the summer. And here is what she sings:

The lonely daughter’s come to play
(SOMETHING) ships be sailed away
Here you can sit, we’ve made a place
Judy, stay

Judy, stay
We’ll float away
And we can play
Judy, stay

I whispered things you could not say
You killed the loneliness that day
We need a spot to make her place
Judy, stay

Judy, stay
We’ll sail away
Go and stand, she waits
Judy, stay

Oooooooh
Oooooooh
Oooooooooooooooooh

Judy stay
We’ll sail away
She sits and waits
Judy stay

We drove away
Judy stayed
We drove away
Judy, wait
We drove away
Judy, wait

Na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na

Na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na
Na na na

Na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na
Na na na

Na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na
Na na na na na na na na na
Na na na

Just before the "Na na na" part begins, the accordion kicks up, and the song surges away on waves of glorious melancholy.

The mood is much like that of "Dumbfound You" but without the bitterness, almost contemplative, and musically is much more complex. It also shows, even more than the more rocking songs like "Box of Glass," just how much Mary and Cindy have grown since their Pee Shy days -– the 'Shy always had to be in motion, either baffling or amusing us or dazzling us with their brilliant wordplay or rockin' our asses off, but rarely if ever did they allow themselves to be this still, be this quiet, and just simply be. (Some exceptions: "Smoking Gun," the Cindy-sung version of Alice Cooper's "Only Women Bleed," and the cover Pee Shy once performed of the Guided by Voices song "Gleemer" spring to mind.) The Caulfield Sisters are confident enough to stay in place and let their music stand on its own.

It’s also interesting to note a lyrical shift at the end of the song: As in Ms. Cushing's essay, the narrator eventually moves away with her family, leaving the imaginary Judy behind. ("Judy sat on the broad front step of the big, old, double-doored entrance, one skinny arm draped across knobby knees, the other waving good-bye as the ancient, wood-sided Ford station wagon, packed to the rooftop, hove out of sight. There was no question of taking her along.") Yet Cindy turns this around: Even as she leaves Judy behind, she begs Judy not to leave: "We drove away/Judy, wait."

Why? Why act as if Judy is the one who’s leaving? It almost suggests someone with abandonment issues –- cutting herself off from those dearest to her, then wondering where they went –- or someone feeling herself in the grip of forces she cannot control, so that her leaving people or them leaving her are emotionally equivalent. (I can relate: When I moved away from the Tampa Bay area I found myself mourning for it and for my friends left behind, as though life had stolen them from me. So maybe I’m projecting a bit?) Or maybe this is one of those cirumstances in which you leave people because you have to, even if it's the last thing you want ("how'd you learn to walk away/when you saw that you could not stay," as Cindy sang in "Smoking Gun").

Or maybe this is just what life does to all of us, shoving us out of wombs and homes and relationships before we’re ready, not just at the end of childhood (in which the wood-paneled station wagon leaves knobby-kneed Judy sitting on the steps in exactly the same way that Christopher Robin leaves behind his much more famous imaginary friends in the Hundred Acre Wood at the end of The House on Pooh Corner, and in the same way that J.R.R. Tolkien said all fairy tales must end with the protagonist back home in the real world he can no longer comfortably live in, bereft and longing endlessly to return to the lost magical realm); but also in the way that life steadily strips parents, siblings, friends, loved ones away from us, until it finally comes to claim our selves, shuttling us off into whatever new home awaits while the only true friend who stood with us in our loneliness remains waving by the double doors.

Eventually, we all learn to move on, make do with whatever we've got left, and bravely face whatever is next, which after all can be much greater than anything we've experienced so far. The Caulfield Sisters certainly don't cling to any idealized, nostalgic past. But once in a while, it's not such a bad thing to look through the rear windshield and remember how we got here and what it cost us.

Judy, stay.

P.S. Don’t just take my word for it. Subscribe to the magazine today! It’ll be the best $17 to $18 a year you ever spent.

P.P.S. Sorry for the long-time, no-write, but all has been eerily quiet on the Caulfields front. Isn’t it amazing how much buzz this band has gotten considering that they don’t perform very often and almost never record anything? Truly a testiment to their greatness, I think.

P.P.P.S. Sleater-Kinney's new album, The Woods, totally fucking rocks, just like everyone's been telling you.