From track one, the power poppy, punchy, punky songcraft will get your attention. Snotty, bratty vocals, taut harmonies, and well-oiled guitar parts fit together seamlessly. While the CD doesn’t stray far from straight-ahead rock, there are enough acoustic surprises to keep things interesting.

We hear them moaning in the dead of night, curse if they cross our paths when we are driving, or make a wish if they pass over us.

Freight trains are a part of our landscape.

I had an opportunity to take a trip on one of those monsters and talk to the engineer about life on the rails. This reporting took place under-the-radar of the train company, so I have blurred certain facts, places and names. Other than that, everything reported here is truth, exaggeration or hearsay.

Stepping out of the car by the railroad crossing, I find myself alone, surrounded by hectares of horizon. Awkwardly, I stand by the side of the two-lane country road and pretend to be a corn photographer as the occasional truck driver passes and looks me over.

There seems to be a tradition in early baroque and classical music of taking another composer’s piece and rewriting it to demonstrate your superior writing, deriving masterful variations from the other composer’s weaker theme. The gesture can be flattering or insulting, a respectful tribute or machismo in a powdered wig. We see it in its polite form in Bach’s Musical Offering, where Bach composes a clever, showy masterpiece based on a challenge and melody issued to him by Frederick II.

If Illinois is Renaissance Italy, Urbana’s Paul Kotheimer is the Leonardo Da Vinci of the home studio. Originally from Chicago, he’s been making his home in Urbana for nearly fifteen years. A little story about Paul: once a local songwriter told Paul that she was interested in starting a collective of local musicians. Surprised, Paul responded that he had been acting, for years, as if there already were a collective of local musicians. He helps out everywhere, often for free: WEFT, Red Herring, The Channing-Murray, people’s weddings, loaning equipment, setting up PAs, playing for something, nothing, anything, nowhere somewhere anywhere, in the acoustic nightmare of local cafes, 6th and Green late Friday night, crooning to drunk jocks, singing louder than the MTD Green line, playing the WEFT sessions, having his music mixed through a blender, recording the Guerilla Parlor Ensemble, helping Beezus, helping me. Hoping somebody will occasionally toss the words “thank you” into his guitar case. Some guy from Herring Boys still hasn’t paid Paul for the Rickenbacker bass he took.