Recently I've been listening to a live Sage Francis album that I bought on South Street a little over a week after I got to Philadelphia. It's called "Road Tested: 2003-2005" and it's a collection of some of the better quality live recordings of Sage stuff during that time period. I'm trying to figure out what it is that has me listening to that album as much as I have been. Part of it might be the idea that it's live and therefore some how more real than a studio track (which is a little bit ridiculous because who says that what is produced in a studio is no less real than what is produced on a stage. They're just different). Maybe it's because I know that Grüvis Malt is playing on a lot of the tracks, and anyone who knows me knows that I had a huge Grüvis phase, which I do not regret in any way.

The track that I find myself going back to, however, is Specialist. It's a song that starts out, "The one that I'm with thinks sex is a beautiful thing, and that's simply adorable." The live recording has a band backing Sage in a really amazingly dense and sort of warm way (vague, yes, but you have to hear studio versus live... it's wonderful). Another section of the lyrics are "I may just change and adjust when I branch out/ Leave, get off my damn couch and achieve/ What I dream/ about leave my house hand out my keys/ To the sleepless/ beauty who failed math class and can't count her Z's." Okay so the line markings were kinda arbitrary and copied from the lyrics site that I copied and pasted that from, but still.

So pretty.

"She's a fairy with broken wings, I used to watch her perform, and if she hears me I hope she sings songs that had me going right back..."

Shit, I love this stuff. Maybe it's the idea that Sage Francis did a lot of poetry competitively, and therefore has a really spoken word way about his rapping, though it is definitively rapping.

I don't know. It just kinda makes me smile.