Every so often I go through a phase of total hero-worship of some obscure indie rock idol. Usually it’s Mark Eitzel, but right now it’s Thalia Zedek. Partly it’s a guitar thing: the way her playing and Chris Brokaw’s work together on some of the best Come tracks is simply awesome. On that score, Thalia and Chris are my joint obscure indie rock idols of the month. What makes Thalia special, though, is the raw vocals and the smart, unflinching lyrics they deliver.

There’s a kind of courage in her singing which may have something to do with being gay, but goes beyond the kind of toughness-you-need-to-survive implied by that. That kind of toughness doesn’t always correlate directly with honesty. It can be the belligerence needed to sustain a convenient fiction about oneself: I’m so tough, all this shit doesn’t bother me. I think the message in Thalia’s music is often the same as the message in Mark Eitzel’s: you can tell that story to yourself, you can tell it to your friends and your enemies, but part of you knows it isn’t true and if you really want to survive and to be someone who might possibly deserve to survive then you need to listen to what that part is saying.