Dear editors:
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I’m writing to complain about your February 12 Spot Check column. Your writer, Monica Kendrick, trashed one of my favorite bands, the Nields, and if her writing were based on actually listening to and constructively criticizing the band, then her Spot Check column would serve its purpose: that we readers might make an informed decision on what acts we’d like to see. Of course, no writer can know every performer and must sometimes use press kits, the Internet, colleagues’ opinions, etc, to write this kind of column, but your writer’s meanness and disregard for facts betray her disrespect (and by extension your paper’s disrespect) for the performers she reviews and us readers.
Miss Kendrick goes on to say the new album is hard to listen to. But why? Her final “explanation” ends with “and with lyrics about driving to Santa Fe in search of Georgia O’Keeffe’s spirit with Ani DiFranco on the tape deck, they make the Indigo Girls sound like masters of subtlety.” Oh, there’s a nice dig at the Indigo Girls too. The actual line of the song is “Ani DiFranco on the tape player / Thinking of the things I’d say to her [Georgia O’Keeffe].” Hard to listen to? The refrain of the song is “O, Georgia O. / I wanna be a woman like you.” Simple. Easy to listen to. If your writer knew anything about the band, she would know the Nields do love to play; they play beautifully with an infectious sense of humor and give you all they’ve got the whole time they’re onstage. With all of the bands out there, you can find only a handful who can consistently write as many intelligent, catchy, listenable songs as Nerissa Nields, (who is married to David Nields, not his sister–just for the record).
PS to Monica Kendrick: Fuck you.
