round 1
(6) concrete blonde, “everybody knows”
resolved
(11) frente!, “bizarre love triangle”
204-198
and will play on in the second round
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/5/22.
SRH (Seriously Revolutionary Handbill!): karleigh frisbie brogan on Concrete Blonde’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows”
Erica and I pretend-smoked beneath the UA 5 theater’s marquee. It was a warm night, typical for September, but I wore the noisy, stiff leather jacket anyway. It was glossy black and smelled faintly of cigs and Exclamation—left behind at my dad’s apartment by one of his dates. It made me feel badass, like I was the Samantha Mathis character. The “eat-me beat-me lady.” Erica called it my Michael Jackson jacket, which annoyed me because it was way more goth than King of Pop. We wore the matching dog tag necklaces we got at Contempo, almost-black lipstick, and lots of crushed velvet and stretchy lace. We were fourteen-almost-fifteen, new best friends in a new decade. The year before: Germans cheered atop a graffitied wall, Dana Carvey became president, ducks and sea otters got smothered in oil, and I crouched with my family under the kitchen table as our house rattled and swayed in the Loma Prieta earthquake.
The movie we were about to see was Allan Moyle’s 1990 teen drama, Pump Up the Volume. It would be my second time, Erica’s fourth. We were totally obsessed, went to see it tons that fall, even followed it to the cheapo theater one town over. Erica snuck a bulky tape recorder that required a week’s allowance-worth of D batteries in under her coat and recorded the entire thing so we could listen to it as we fell asleep at night, memorizing Hard Harry’s pervy catchphrases. Also on cassette: the soundtrack I took with me everywhere. I bought it at Wherehouse Records with the ten-dollar bill I got in a trick-or-treat card from Grams. The nubs on its case were already busted off, its magnetic tape stretched thin from so much play. Though its cover art was budget—featuring a grainy still of Christian Slater’s Mark Hunter in purple monochrome—its content was invaluable, an abridged primer on cool. But thirty-some-odd years later I realize it wasn’t the Pixies or Sonic Youth tracks, wasn’t Bad Brains doing MC5, the early Soundgarden, or the solo Peter Murphy, nor was it the Eazy-E g-funk protégés Above the Law sampling James Brown by way of Vicki Anderson’s Black feminist anthem “The Message from the Soul Sisters.” No. It was Concrete Blonde’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” that altered me.
The first time I heard it, I was confused. Pissed, even. I’d expected the version I knew from the film—the preset drum-machine beat, the creepy synthesized strings, the seemingly out-of-place Spanish guitar and, mostly, Cohen’s startling voice, so deep and sure, chilled with a smiling cynicism. This one had a different tune, tempo, and singer. Instead of giving me goosebumps it gave me anxiety.
At the time, I was only sort-of familiar with Concrete Blonde. Their hit, “Joey,” was gateway, broke me from bubblegum. It was Johnette Napolitano’s husky rasp, her matte black hair, bangs that voided her eyes and made her mouth big. It was that she didn’t have her own drugstore perfume, didn’t perform in front of Miller’s Outpost. The video played at least twice a day after school, and I watched, rapt. For all the song’s impact, however, it had been the only one of theirs I knew. Maybe I was a few grades too young. They were the kind of band that kids my age with older sisters were into. The same girls who listened to Sinéad O’Connor and R.E.M. when I was still Debbie Gibson and Tiffany all the way.
Concrete Blonde’s sound was a little Anne Rice-novel goth, a little LA sleaze rock, a little Brigade-era Heart. The production value was clean and commercial, even on their decidedly more punk tracks. It was precisely because of their blend of pop accessibility and underground cachet that they were commissioned to cover Cohen’s song for Pump Up the Volume. Moyle wanted the original but New Line Cinema’s Bob Shaye thought it too gloomy and old-man. In the end, both got their way: The Cohen original plays in diegesis throughout the film, Hard Harry’s theme song with which he opens his nightly broadcast; the chorus of Concrete Blonde’s cover is used at the film’s climax—a mere 26 seconds toward the end of the film. It’s a variation on a theme, the octave-up belt from a big-lunged contralto as the hero and his love interest drive off, clumsily, into the night.
In this version, guitars shimmer, emitting the fading warmth of a sunset—a desert sunset, specifically, the kind that yields to windy, bitter, starlit cold. Though the beat is slower—exactly the pace of walking across campus to fifth-period French, head down, hair in eyes—Napolitano burns through the verses more quickly, as if to avoid sitting with their implications. Unlike the detached, disheartened, and droll vocals of Cohen, Napolitano’s are impassioned and mournful. There’s just the slightest hint of tremble in her voice—from exhaustion, it seems. Or fear. Or maybe the vice with which to cope.
The lyrics were written by Cohen and his back-up singer-cum-artistic collaborator, Sharon Robinson. The message: everything’s fucked. The song’s a dark and defeatist commentary on the status quo, referencing class struggle, racism, corruption, infidelity, and plague. “The poor stay poor and the rich get rich, that’s how it goes,” is how it goes.
At 15, I didn’t get all the innuendos. I frequently misheard them, collapsing their meanings. It’s dice that are loaded, not days—though mine most certainly were, with homework and chores and the preps giving me dirty looks. I knew the song was bleak, but I couldn’t yet map it onto the safe, suburban, wall-to-wall carpeted world I was familiar with. Teachers sucked and so did parents (except for Erica’s). Cops were pigs who’d put me in jail for the pinch of schwag in my backpack. Politicians wore powdered wigs and had wooden teeth. That’s really all I knew.
The song, either version, worked perfectly with the movie’s plot. Super quick: it’s about a quiet teenage loner, the aforementioned Mark Hunter, who, by night, adopts the alter-ego of Happy Harry Hard-on (a.k.a. Hard Harry)—a disgruntled, sardonic insurrectionist, a horny, onanist Ann Landers, and a deejay of very cool music—and airs a pirate radio station from the basement of his parents’ home. His message, like the song itself, is that everything’s fucked. “Everything’s polluted,” he says, ripping off the polite-maniacal delivery of Jack Nicholson, “the environment, the government, the schools, you name it.” His censure of authority, establishment, guidance counselors, even his dad are general and sweeping—bumper sticker imperatives that foment unrest and excitement in every puby adolescent in his fictional Arizona burb, uniting jocks and stoners and punks and princesses alike. Teens revolt, school admin and city-council-meeting moms quake in their footwear, feds get involved, corruption is exposed, sexy scene, chase scene, call to action, end.
The movie’s driving concern is freedom of speech. Happy Harry Hard-on’s shorthand for the First Amendment is “talk hard,” and his devotees spray paint it all over campus. At the end of the film, right after Hard Harry is hauled away by police and just before the credits roll, we hear a sound collage of young voices announcing their call letters and dial designations into the ether. It’s the promise of a polyvocal, youth-driven future.
I didn’t look too hard at the character of Mark/ Harry back then. I thought he was hot with his widow’s peak, his bowling shirt, and his cigarette. His oh-so-deep-sounding monologue that ribboned through the film’s hour and forty-five. I failed to see his (possibly unintended) hypocrisies. Unable to connect with people in real life, Mark dons a persona and uses technology to reach out to a worshipping audience. But, just like his penchant to compulsively jack off (also just an act), his radio show is, to him anyway, masturbatory. He has convinced himself that he’s only screaming into the void, eschewing the vulnerability and accountability that come with actual human relationships. When he sees evidence that swaths of people have been impacted by his words, he’s made uncomfortable. At one point, after he implores his listeners to “go crazy,” and they, indeed, do, he regrets his words, acting as if he never meant them. “This is out of control,” he says, cowering behind a pillar. “This whole thing is making me ill.”
It’s ironic—or genius—that Mark/Harry, though furious with the status quo and successful in upsetting it to some degree, when confronted with his influence, wishes, if only momentarily, to maintain said status quo. To be yet another verse in his beloved song. He had underestimated the power of his voice, the disruption and unfamiliarity it was capable of ushering in, this voice that no longer needed him at all.
His cat-got tongue, his swimmy tum, not evidence of poseurdom but of, by my read, fear. It’s possible he knew his identity would soon be revealed and, socially awkward shadow dweller that he was, was afraid to be seen. I’m reminded of a 1977 Audre Lorde essay: She explains our reasons for staying silent when we need to speak out are varied—fearing everything from pillory to glory. “But most of all, I think,” she says, “we fear the visibility.”
When I watched the movie those fall nights long ago, amidst the smell of fake butter and real leather I, too, wanted to rise up and vandalize school property, blow up my kitchen, kick over a garbage can, talk hard. I was fed up! With what, I’m not entirely sure. But it wasn’t hormones. Or a fad. How I hated those explain-aways. I was a teenager who, like all teenagers, was experiencing the cold-water shock of having my boat, the one I had been in since birth, the one I trusted to keep me safe, tip over again and again. This was called learning. I was not yet at the place where the grown-ups were, back inside it, afraid to rock it, as the expression goes. I had integrated the woes of the world osmotically, inherited their memories genetically, could not articulate what they were exactly, but felt them banging inside of me. This was before I was taught to forget my anger, before I learned to sit still in my boat. Itchy and optimistic, Erica and I decided to start an underground paper. We named it SRH, our high school’s monogram and a nod to HHH—Hubert Humphrey High, the fictional school that loaned Happy Harry Hard-on his initials. I won’t disclose what we made SRH stand for because it’s way too cringey. I’ll admit we consulted a thesaurus.
Our paper was a tabloid-sized sheet, double-sided, handwritten, printed at Kinko’s with the money I had collected for cheer squad candy bar sales. Screw cheer. The paper criticized society, pointed out injustices, mocked the popular kids, gossiped about teachers, and dog-whistled references to cool music and drugs. We hoped to witness students passing around our anonymous broadside, mouths agape. To hear warnings over the morning bulletin that its authors, if found, would face suspension, expulsion even. To start some kind of revolution. I remember arriving on campus before zero period to distribute the paper. We left copies on desks, shoved them into locker vents, piled them atop The Santa Rosan. Then waited. In Mr. Hegerhorst’s geometry class, kids brushed them onto the floor with nary a glance. After school, a few blew around in the quad, covered in footprints. A stack of them looked up at me from a garbage can. It wasn’t until the next day I finally saw someone reading it. A quiet loner whose name I didn’t know. A Mark Hunter. I smiled. Just one person was all I needed to see.
Truth was, that no one gave two figs about our paper only supported the song’s sentiment. See? I thought then. Shit’s fucked. And the song isn’t just saying that shit’s fucked. It’s saying that shit’s fucked despite how it appears or what we tell ourselves. What looks fair is rigged. What seems stable is precarious. What claims to be progress is, often, just maintenance. Emancipation, Brown v. Board, the civil rights act—but still, as the song goes: “Old Black Joe’s still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows.”
I’d pop my tape into my turquoise boombox, scrub it back to the beginning, and plop onto my top-bunk bed in the room I shared with two sisters, a damp room with pink walls covered in heavy-metal posters and black mold. That first crack of the snare and glimmer of the guitar became the sound of my ache. I let Johnette’s voice superimpose my own, let it speak for me in ways I didn’t yet have the courage to. The Cohen version would never have worked for me. Both songs may have been saying the same exact thing but their emotional content differed. One was nihilistic, closed off, and Kelvin-cold, the other doleful yet resilient and expansive. One made me denounce God and the other made yearn for him. One made me want to give up while the other made me want to give.
I recently watched a live recording of Johnette performing “Everybody Knows” for MTV’s 120 Minutes in 1997. She’s accompanied by a single acoustic guitar. Floats in a long, pale dress. Her eyes switch from spooked to somber and back again. Her voice is somehow both wispy and rich, tough and frail. She’s old by music industry standards—just turned forty—but still displays the bruises of youth. Still moans like it’s her first hurt.
And here I am now, almost seven years older than she is in the recording. I, too, feel new in many ways. I am learning that silence is complicity. Is violence. Is not a virtue. Not golden. I am learning that I can learn from young people, from whence their rebellion and activism meets. I am learning not to sit still in my boat no matter how tired I am. No matter how nice or how crappy my boat is. It seems we’re at a time when things couldn’t possibly be more fucked. I won’t even list examples of the fuckery because it just makes me, and you, even more tired. Because everybody knows already.
Karleigh Frisbie Brogan is a writer from Sonoma County, California who currently resides in Portland, Oregon. Her writing has been published in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Huffington Post, Entropy, Nailed, Lana Turner, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. She is an editor at Kithe and the wine person at your favorite store. Find her writing at karleighfrisbiebrogan.com and on Twitter @FrisbieKarleigh.
Say the Words That I Can’t Say: jillian luft On Frente!’s Cover of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle”
My best friend, Lauren, and I were dying to see the movie, Threesome. Its title alone promised steamy taboos to fog up our prepubescent brains. What we gathered from the trailer was this: A post–Twin Peaks Lara Flynn Boyle, one of the loser Baldwin brothers and the goofy guy from Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead were college roommates who did dirty, perverted stuff to one another. The tagline quivered across our TV sets in crayon-like squiggles, “1 Girl, 2 Guys, the possibilities…are endless.” I struggled to imagine these possibilities, conceive of all the prurient combinations that awaited our innocent eyes.
In early 1994, I moved in with my father and his new girlfriend, my mom’s former nurse and friend. The new girlfriend had a toddler daughter. She lived with us. So did my younger brother. My terminally ill mother did not live with us. Dad left her back in the fall of 1993. He left my brother and me, too. For his new girlfriend, my mom’s former nurse and friend. But now Mom was near death in a hospital, so he had to take us back. 1 dad, 1 new girlfriend, 3 kids and 1 dying mom, the possibilities were…overwhelming…scary…painfully finite.
The music used in Threesome’s TV spots was New Order’s 1986 synth masterjam, “Bizarre Love Triangle.” A cute and clever way to underscore the movie’s unconventional premise. The song experienced a modest resurgence. A remix of the original received frequent airplay on top 40 radio and appeared on the original motion picture soundtrack.
In the backseat of my dad’s Hyundai, on our way to the hospital, I listened to its faux strings somersault through my heart, its drums mimicking the erratic pulse of the supremely infatuated. I thought of sunshine and sex and freedom. Of bright blue skies and naked men. I knew next to nothing about most of these things but I was certain that their secrets were knotted up somewhere in those throbbing, sparkling, swirling layers of confusion. There was also something disquieting about Bernard Sumner’s voice. His casual lamentation. The song was vibrant, rife with contradictions and chaotically alive.
I didn’t try to untangle its complexities. In fact, I crawled further into its seductive web while the world fell away. Like all the music I loved at this time, it trapped me, enveloped me, swallowed me whole. The lyrics were nonsensical but I was hardly paying attention to them. I let them crash against my consciousness like waves against the shore.
I liked New Order, but here’s what I loved in 1994: Hole, Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots. Music that assaulted the eardrums, confounded the brain, and blistered the heart. I lay on my bedroom floor with headphones on, the volume as high as it would go. Something about the dangerous decibel level and those distorted guitars. The caterwauls of angst, the thorny snarls of disillusionment. I closed my eyes, entered the deafening dark, and waited for the tears to spill.
In 1994, Dad loved to play the Eric Clapton Unplugged album, especially its strum-heavy and impotent rendition of “Layla.” This was not surprising, but rather disappointing. I sought connection with my dad after our estrangement, common ground for us to traverse so we’d meet somewhere in the friendly middle. So, we’d look each other in the eyes with something akin to respect, if not understanding. His love of the lesser “Layla” did not make this easy. There was no gorgeously overblown outro, no guitar hemorrhaging with unrequited desire, no potential to lose myself in some sordid rock-n-roll soap opera. There was nowhere to hide. I was face-to-face with an old man on his knees, drowsily begging his darlin’ please. It was pathetic.
I blamed the popularity of all sounds un-electric on the show, MTV Unplugged. Touted as innovative music programming and a watershed cultural moment, MTV Unplugged regularly featured middle-aged rock dudes (Sting, Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart, Clapton) taking to the stage with their untethered instruments, desperately classing it up for a cash-grab. There were the rare exceptions (Nirvana, Pearl Jam) but this tacky ploy for relevancy was definitely the norm. Therefore, I deemed acoustic music dull, hokey, lazy. The instrumentation deferred to the lyrics, like a partner sticking it out in a loveless marriage—resigned and nearly invisible, a pale imitation of what it once was. Acoustic music fans, like my father, championed the stripped-down sound for its honesty, its simplicity. But its attempt at truth was disingenuous. A farce. It was a play at vulnerability. It was trying too hard.
When I was 13, the possibilities were endless. I could be a girl who liked the beach and her body, who liked her body at the beach. I could wear a foundation that matched my skin tone, tone my face with witch hazel until it glowed, glow like a Bongo Jeaned big-booby babe in baby tees screenprinted with sunflowers. I could be a raging narcissist, only caring about the trivial and ephemeral, forever fixated on Keanu Reeves’ gargantuan face above my bed. I could go to Lollapalooza. I could be called “fine as hell” by some dimwit in a Big Johnson tee and backwards cap. But at the beach, I remained on the sand, watching the milky folds of my stomach undulate in my daisy print bikini. I peered at my navel, inspected my stubbly armpit hair. I thought about skin care regimens and back-to-school outfits. Eventually, my mind drifted. I reluctantly considered my mother.
When I was 13, the facts were grim. My mom was comatose in intensive care. My dad was majorly depressed, incapable of forgiving himself. His new girlfriend was lovely and kind and I couldn’t find a way to hate her. So, I turned to the radio, turned away from my thoughts. Quiet invited contemplation. Quiet invited the presence of death. In the quiet, I was forced to listen to what I didn't want to hear. In the quiet, the world got closer when all I wanted to do was retreat. Music was how I escaped. How I faded, how I disappeared. How I felt close to dying without truly dying. How I felt close to living without truly living. The best music felt like clinging to the edge of a cliff while the wind blustered and the sky caught fire. Everything felt scary and beautiful and nothing felt like a choice.
On sleepless nights in the spring of 1994, the long-haired guy kept me company. I can’t remember the name of this MTV sandman, doling out obscure music videos like they were lucid dreams, although I recall the name of his bald successor (Matt Pinfield). The show was 120 Minutes. 120 minutes of possibility. 120 minutes of oblivion. 120 minutes of simultaneously becoming and unbecoming. Of existing somewhere between night and dawn, between the living and the dead. This is what it felt like when I was 13, when I was anxious and sleep-deprived and dramatic. All I had were those songs, those videos, that strange late-night portal ripping through the fragile fabric of reality, ready to tear my whole and terrible world asunder.
Between Madder Rose and The Jam, a video I’d never seen before by a band named Frente! A young woman in close-up—pixie haircut, nose ring, gamine charm—singing a familiar song. A cover of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle.”
For the first 30 seconds, I was skeptical. My synth masterjam now rendered an acoustic folk ballad. This was not my thing. Far from it. But there was no half-hearted strumming, each note of the melody was precisely and solemnly played. In this version, the song was a mournful hymn. In this version, the song was a eulogy to its predecessor. It was a willful looking back, a wistful snapshot in time pared down to two minutes of pure poignancy.
When the video ended, I’d come face-to-face with myself. My real face, all open and tear-stained. It wasn’t what lead singer, Angie Hart, sang but how. Her voice, high and soft, much like my own, illuminating the depths of my despair, the stunted pit of my innocence. She was my proxy, confessing what I would if I knew how to articulate how I felt with language, with music. Like those songs I preferred to lose myself in, my life was loud and complex, eluding easy explanation. Frente!’s low-key cover afforded me the space to think, to breathe, to clarify the ways everything felt totally screwed up.
Unlike the original, this iteration of “Bizarre Love Triangle” didn’t evoke images of sunshine or freedom or bright blue skies. It evoked the loss of those things. And in those liminal hours loaded with doubt and desperation, I let it break my heart. I let it say the words that I couldn’t say.
In this version, the melody was distilled to its bummer essence, a plainspoken ode to a vague sadness. And I mined that sadness for specificity. I thought about all the things I’d never told my mom, all the things I felt but refused to name. I uncovered how fucking angry I was. At my mom’s useless body, at my dad’s selfish betrayal, at the absence of god or anything reasonable and good in the world, at how illness disrupted, and in some ways, destroyed my childhood. I discovered that I sometimes resented my mom more than I loved her and I didn’t feel bad about that. I felt entitled to my bitterness. Still, underneath the rage and resentment, there was a terrifying abundance of love, of unspeakable need.
I thought about how I’d prepared for my world to end by building a new one out of noise and artifice, crowding my head with a feckless clamor until I couldn’t think, until I couldn’t hear my own voice. Until I couldn’t hear hers. Because to hear her was to see her was to feel her was to lose her. Was to lose a version of myself. To be replaced by what?
All spring long, and into the summer of 1994, Frente! tumbled through MTV’s Buzz Bin—a curated group of music videos played ad nauseam, hyped as the next big thing all the cool kids should know. My living room was tuned to this channel 24-7. I wanted to be a cool kid.
On weekday afternoons bloated with monotony, while finishing homework or trimming my bangs, the girl with the pixie cut and voice like my own would appear. But the song failed to resonate the way it did when first I heard it at 2 am. No bleary-eyed exorcism, no long, dark but incredibly mellow night of the soul.
It was the same song: mawkish yet tender, quiet yet direct. And yet, I couldn’t access the pathos. It was different when the rest of the world was awake, I was different—too tuned in to what was expected of me, what I expected of myself. I couldn’t give myself the room to fall apart.
Meanwhile, the original in its newly remixed form continued to flood the airwaves. Both songs were inescapable. The past, freshly alive in the present. The present singing in the shadows of the past. Me, living a life (a lie) that I couldn’t leave behind.
In 1994, other threesomes. Me and…
an uncertain future, an irretrievable past
a naive hope, an impossible reality
the comfort of sublimation, the charge of catharsis
the “I’m not sure what this could mean,” the “why can’t we be ourselves like we were yesterday?”
In the weeks leading up to my mother’s death, almost everything I wrote in my journal was a lie. Only in those forsaken nocturnal hours, alone and wired, could I truly reckon with my impending grief. In the daylight, I buried what I felt—even from myself. Thoughts and feelings were distorted, omitted, or grossly heightened to please two competing and imaginary audiences: the coolest version of myself and an idealized version of my mom. I wanted to be her good girl, sincere and optimistic. But I also wanted to be popular and hot. When I tried to speak from both wants, I sounded like I was trying too hard. I sounded fake. Like a bastardized version of myself. A cruddy copy:
July 8th, 1994
My mom is N the hospital right now but it isn’t 1 of her regular visits. I know I will have 2 go on w/ my life. That is what she would want me 2 do but still I have much faith that she will live.
July 9th, 1994
I don’t know what I am going 2 do or how I am going 2 feel when she dies but I will try to be strong…I’d feel so empty if she goes. I just don’t know. I don’t want 2 think about it.
July 11th, 1994
It’s not fair that just because I don’t have big tits, I can’t have a boyfriend. Just because I’m flat doesn’t mean I can’t be a good girlfriend. Also, my prayers have been with my mom. She’s an angel on earth & will pull through this. I know it.
July 12th, 1994
I’m still anxious about getting school clothes. My image is very important 2 me.
July 13th, 1994
Life is grand! There aren’t many times that I say that. The reason why I can say this 2-day is because my mom looks better and is N better spirits. Today wuz her birthday which even at the hospital, we celebrated w/ cake, balloons and cards.
July 15th, 1994
I really can’t think of anything else to write about. Well, my goals I could tell you. Here they are:
1. A boyfriend
2. A ride to school
3. Getting my mom well
4. Pleasing me and everyone else(in no particular order)
By the time school started again, my mom was dead, my dad’s love triangle had resolved itself, and I’d finally seen Threesome. The movie was decent, but much more earnest than expected. There was little nudity, nothing titillated or provoked. Instead, young adults discovered who they were, unraveling the mysteries of their hang-ups, confronting what haunted them to better themselves. In other words, it was kind of boring.
In 1994, there was me, the stories I told myself, and the truth I avoided. For a brief moment, I chose the truth. A simpler and starker version of it. A few minimal chords. A hushed and contained reverence for the sentimental. A spare rendition that spared no feelings.
At that time, Frente!’s “Bizarre Love Triangle '' cut to the quick like no other song could. Ultimately, the song was a footnote in my grieving, in my growing up. But for a while, it was a crucial page. For a brief moment, it was the whole story.
Jillian Luft is a Florida native currently residing in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Booth, Hobart, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and other publications. She still thinks that most acoustic covers suck. You can find Jillian on Twitter @JillianLuft or read more of her writing at jillianluft.com.