The shuffler: Book-publicist-turned-essayist
Sloane
Crosley, author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake, a collection of humorous
pieces written in a droll, playfully sour voice that evokes the likes of David
Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, and David Rakoff. Her stories cover a range of subject
matter from locking herself out of her Manhattan apartment to withstanding a
stint as a bridesmaid.
Bree Sharp, "David Duchovny"
Sloane Crosley: This is an insane song
that came out right around when The X-Files was really popular. I
know this sounds like a weird thing to say if you're under the age of 80, but
she's got a hell of a set of pipes. She's very extreme about her obsession with
David Duchovny: "David Duchovny, why won't you love me? I'm going to kill
Scully." I actually wasn't a X-Files fan, but I was a big Twin Peaks fan, so there's a David
Duchovny connection there. It's like, "David Duchovny, I want you to love me,
to kiss and to hug me, debrief and debug me." She just wants to be abducted
into the alien light of the spaceship of love. [Laughs.]
In-flight Portuguese Language Lesson, "At The
Airport"
SC: You know those language tapes you can get that
allegedly teach you an entire language? I went to Lisbon on a fluke. Every
vacation I take, I take to write, essentially, because I have two jobs. I
hadn't taken a real, sincere vacation probably since 2000. I thought I was
going to go crazy, so I spun a globe. I had rules beforehand: I was not allowed
to go a place I'd already been, I couldn't go anywhere that depleted my entire
life savings to get there, and I couldn't go to a war zone. So I spun the globe
and landed smack-dead in the ocean. I spun again and my finger landed on
Lisbon. I was like, "All righty, I'm going." It was crazy. I was sitting in the
airport like, "What have I done?" Lisbon was a little bit shady. But it was
beautiful, and the people were really friendly. I can now say "Eu não falo Português," which is: "I don't speak
Portuguese." What's weird is if you say that well enough, people keep talking
to you. No good deed goes unpunished.
Belle & Sebastian, "I Don't Love Anyone"
SC: I feel like this was a sort of album [Tigermilk] that got passed around
at the start, in terms of there only being a few tapes of it. I remember it
being hard to get hold of before they put it on CD. I was living in Scotland to
study for a time, and they sold these really huge, gigantic posters at this
record store there: probably 9'-by-5' band posters. They were two-for-one, and the
one I actually bought was Kula Shaker, because I thought it was really cool.
It's a giant picture of a guy coming up an escalator, and it's framed in my
apartment. It's heinous, totally ugly, but I love it. The other one I got, for
free, is the cover of this album.
The A.V. Club: Belle & Sebastian is a
fairly literary song-writing project. As someone who works with books, do you
gravitate toward literary songwriting?
SC: I do. I think it can veer pretty easily into the
too-precious realm. What's funny is that I'll get very into stuff like The
Decemberists' constant storytelling, or Belle & Sebastian songs about dorky
kids at school, with references to actual literary works in them. But if I listen
to that stuff too much, I find myself just going back and listening to The
Rolling Stones.