My favorite band has a new album out! I would have Colin Meloy’s hyper-verbal babies if given half the chance. Who else would write an album about a man marrying a crane? Who else writes songs that sound like a Dicken’s novel? Who else uses the words elan and dolor in songs to my inner word geek dance?

No one.

Lately I’ve been listening to My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist over and over. It’s got the French resistance, a communist who becomes a punk rock tobacco grower in South Carolina, and a boy lost in a game of high stakes canasta. What is not to love about a story line that dense in a song that lasts only a few minutes.

Now I will have a whole new set of songs to obsess over and dissect. Oh goody goody goody!