Singer-songwriter Birdie Busch has a new blog that I've been following. She writes little essays about her Bohemian life in Philadelphia. I like the way she looks at the world, sunny and uncynical but too sly to seem naive, and with a poet's affection for the derelict and the small. I like her limpid, bemused prose. You get the sense of someone lifting something fragile from a pile of rubble, and carrying it home, daydreaming.

Check her out: http://birdiebusch.blogspot.com/

Also check out her recent album, Pattern of Saturn, or any of her albums, really. They are all full of catchy, tiny, twangy pop tunes about how sad we all are, and how happy we could probably be -- unwinding here and there with a big crashing rock number that Birdie rides out like a happy gull in a hurricane. At first she comes across a little sweeter, and a lot cuter, than I normally like my singer-songwriters, but her voice is so weird and disarming, so homespun, with its breaking wobbly phrasing, she manages to cut the sweetness in a way that, say, Iris Dement just isn't able to do ... without alienating all but the most adventurous listeners, as the Freak Folk folks often seem to want to do.