E-Mail This Article to a Friend Indie’s write wing The Believer and Open City put rock in a lit place BY LEON NEYFAKH
	Related links The Believer's official Web site Open City's official Web site

The second annual music issue of the McSweeney’s monthly literary review the Believer hit newsstands accompanied by a companion CD with a cross-section of indie-rock literati. Several of the musicians on the record even moonlight as semi-professional writers. John Darnielle, who records as the Mountain Goats (and contributes a Spanish-tinged acoustic take of the Silver Jews tune "Pet Politics"), publishes his own Web ’zine. Silver Jews frontman David Berman published his own book of poetry, Actual Air, in 1999. Another contributor to the CD, neo-psych folkie Devendra Banhart (he covers Antony and the Johnsons’ "Fistful of Love"), included two of his poems, read aloud, on the vinyl edition of his most recent album, Rejoicing in the Hands (Young God). Even those musicians on the compilation who haven’t put pen to paper and published write self-consciously poetic lyrics.

The Believer has little in the way of content guidelines: its editors are as likely to run a story on amusement parks as they are a survey of Don Quixote translations. And the two-year-old magazine has sneaked in stories about music every once in a while, focusing on that part of the indie-rock underground that has its roots in the pomo-slanted enchantments of Pavements and the word-drunk lo-fi recordings of Guided by Voices. Interviews with GBV’s Robert Pollard and Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus have been featured alongside essays about Martin Heidegger and H.P. Lovecraft, creating a soundtrack for the Believer’s literary niche. Those involved in this corner of small publishing — the folks at McSweeney’s in San Francisco and New York’s similarly styled Open City group (publishing house and lit mag) — have created an alliance with their counterparts in the independent music world.

McSweeney’s was founded in 1998 by Dave Eggers, who’s best known for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and has since released 16 quarterly collections of short stories and a handful of other books. Much the same way that indie labels like Merge, Matador, and Saddle Creek exist to discover promising artists who are too challenging for the mainstream (Pavement, Bright Eyes, the Magnetic Fields . . . ), McSweeney’s was conceived as an outlet for young, struggling writers who lack the connections to reach big publishers. In adapting indie rock’s DIY credo, Eggers may not have been on to anything new — Henry Rollins has his own publishing imprint, Drag City has released several books, and Girls Against Boys bassist Johnny Temple has his Akashic imprint. But McSweeney’s has created a viable cultural space in which indie-rockers, writers, and critics are interacting, and it’s led to all kinds of collaborations.

This connection is clear on the Believer CD: Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy sings a Joanna Newsom song, Spoon essay a Yo La Tengo tune. The disc itself is a reflection of the incestuous, vibrant, and perhaps insular scene that’s emerged around McSweeney’s and Open City. It’s not uncommon for underground artists to find common cultural ground; as Rick Moody, who’s both a novelist and a member of the indie-folk band the Wingdale Community Singers, observes, "Literature is inherently musical, because prose is a musical medium. And people who care about ‘good’ music tend to like ‘good’ writing."

Some, of course, view McSweeney’s as an elitist endeavor for a mostly white, post-grad, self-consciously literate clique. Achewood, a popular Web comic, once joked: "Did you ever notice how McSweeney’s kind of approaches humor with like a lab coat and a pair of tweezers? It’s like they don’t really know where they belong given all the writing that’s come before them, so they just rip off old New Yorker pieces!" This anxiety over originality, historical context, and legacy may be central to what’s united indie rock with indie lit. Or as David Berman suggests, it could just be that "wordy people are liking wordy music." The Believer’s debut issue had an article on Interpol; the second included an interview with Jack White. The first annual music issue spotlighted Elliott Smith and Colin Meloy. True, the Believer has also done interviews with rappers Q-Tip and Ice Cube, but maybe those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

The musical æsthetic that comes through on the new CD is wistful, lo-fi, introspective, confessional, alienated — not exactly Top 40 fare. John Darnielle’s most recent Mountain Goats album, The Sunset Tree (4AD), features a story line about an abusive stepfather. Another band who could fit right in with the Believer crowd are NYC’s the Hold Steady, who’ve released a series of albums that revolve around the same cast of characters and rely as much on singer Craig Finn’s vivid prose as on the catchy Cheap Trick riffs guitarist Tad Kubler favors. Pete Townshend, a better-known rocker-turned-novelist, has shown that it’s a small step from composing a literate, high-concept album to publishing a book. Open City’s counting on it: the mag has published poetry by Stephen Malkmus and Palace Brother Will Oldham, and the company’s biggest seller, at 15,000 units, is Berman’s Actual Air.

More recently, Open City used a front-cover quip by Malkmus to promote novelist Sam Brumbaugh’s Goodbye, Goodness. The former Pavement frontman raves that Brumbaugh is "a fact finder stuck in a tragicomedy, with slow acoustic guitar as a sidekick." That could almost be a music review. (It’s better than most.) And it makes sense: for the audience Open City is aiming to reach, a Malkmus endorsement is worth a dozen quips from more-mainstream literary types. It also seems to have worked: a recent Village Voice review called Goodbye, Goodness a "low-fi mid-’90s recording in novel form."

One Ring Zero, whose used to be McSweeney’s de facto house band, offer the flip side of the coin with their 2004 book/CD As Smart As We Are (Soft Skull Press/Urban Geek Records), which features lyrics commissioned from Paul Auster and Margaret Atwood as well as Eggers and Moody. According to band member Michael Hearst, the cameos helped firm up the lit-rock connection. "All it takes is Neil Gaiman or Jonathan Ames to post something on their Web site that points to us and whole groups of literary types come visit www.oneringzero.com and download a few MP3s."

It’s also helping the writers that Open City and the Believer champion. As Hearst acknowledges, "It goes both ways. I’ve also gotten e-mails from fans telling me that since buying our last album, they’ve gone out and bought books by every author we’ve worked with."