In Stores Now: It Feels So Good When I Stop by Joe Pernice

Photograph titled "Olympic Hurdlers", depicting Marian Fitting and Anna V. O'Brien, from Vogue magazine, May 15, 1932

I'm not a big fan of movie soundtracks under the best circumstances, so no one was more surprised than me to find myself buying the soundtrack to a novel. And not even a novel by a respected novelist - this is a novel by alt-pop crooner Joe Pernice (of the Pernice Brothers and the Scud Mountain Boys). Why did I rush out to buy this CD then? Simply put, it's the first full-length anything that Pernice (one of my favorite songwriters) has released since 2006. It's understandable - he's been working on some other project - a novel or something.

It's a bit of a stretch to call It Feels So Good When I Stop a full-length album. Of the album's thirteen brief tracks, three are excerpts read from the novel by Pernice, and one is an instrumental that is somehow related to the book's plot. So that leaves us with nine cover songs - that's what this album amounts to. There was a time when that would be plenty - Joe Pernice was a "I could listen to him sing the phonebook" vocalist for me. But his voice is aging, and he no longer has the sweet falsetto from the days of Overcome By Happiness.

Luckily, Pernice's voice still has a compelling quality to it that makes his singing interesting, and he interprets a variety of songs well here. Except for a very flat version of Todd Rundgren's "Hello It's Me", which ends the collection on a flat note. The other eight covers are excellent, though, and range from loyal versions of pop classics ("I Go to Pieces") to smooth R&B ("I'm Your Puppet") and '70s AM cheese ("Chevy Van"). Two of the covers are songs I like a lot - Sebadoh's "Soul and Fire" and the Dream Syndicate's "Tell Me When It's Over". The latter song may be my favorite on the record - Pernice keeps Steve Wynn's original riff and melody, but he removes some of the original version's Neil-Young-isms and heavy drumbeat to make the song into something more delicate and refined.

"Tell Me When It's Over" by Joe Pernice