For the last few years I've been collecting murder ballads, and thought it would be cool to organize them into a kind of "library" -- so here goes Part I. I suppose I'd call these the essentials of the genre, the ballads that best define this very old, perverse, and oddly beautiful tradition. More to come...

Lately I've been listening to a lot of Judee Sill, the brilliant, underrated singer/songwriter of the Laurel Canyon era who was the first artist on David Geffen's label, and who died of a cocaine overdose, young, unrecognized, and destitute in the mid-70s. Her albums are heart-shakingly gorgeous, and this got me to thinking about music by artists largely identified by their tragic lives -- Sill had been a teenage heroin-addicted prostitute who did prison time for armed robbery, and she eventually died of a massive overdose -- but whose music somehow manages to transcend self-pity and morbidity and cynicism, and make something truly beautiful. (Not that there isn't great stuff that IS morbid and cynical...) Anyway, I tried to pull some of that music together here. I really hope you enjoy it.

Great songs that tell stories. And please do send any other narrative-song suggestions my way!

Hard to describe. A mix without theme, but not without motive?

This is what my best friend from high school and I call that disturbing yet irresistable genre of seventies, AM radio, driving-in-the-car-with-your-divorced-mom pop-rock gems. They getcha every time.

This is what it sounds like inside the head of a former goth, who has since developed a sense of humor about herself, but is still haunted, and liking it.