The PowellBooks.Blog nerds keep raving about my beard. It's getting weird. Then they found out I'm vegetarian, drink expensive coffee, and ride a track bike, and those eggheads
freaked! They're all
tweeting me and "liking" my posts on
Facebook. Then, of course, it happened.
They asked for nOOdz. Apparently it was in my Books.Blog contract. Fuck. But my crack legal team has found a loophole: I only need to reveal a "sexy bearded man, known in the music industry." It never actually says it needs to be me.
So here you go:
This is musician William Elliott Whitmore. He's in a beat-up pickup truck, with his chainsaw, out back on his family's farm in Iowa. Somehow as a kid growing up in rural Iowa, he got into punk rock, toured with metal bands, discovered he had a startling, powerful, whiskey-and-gravel voice, picked up a banjo, and started writing some folk songs. He is on the cover of a book I edited called Music from Nowhere. You should read it.
If you like it, you might want to stop looking for sexy photos on the Internet and read a column called This Week's Best Albums. It's a good way to find out about cool music and handsome tattooed farmer musicians from Iowa. This week we have music from El-P, Autolux, Dax Riggs, Vox Arcana, and more.
"There's so much great music out every week, across so many different genres," says our music editor, Scott Morrow, who compiles the weekly list. "Keeping up with it can be daunting, so we try to help you out each week and present a diverse selection of the very best that we've encountered. This eclectic selection mirrors the content of our print edition, which we feel goes markedly further — and deeper underground — than anything else in the bookstore."