NAME: Meredith Ochs
BAND: The Damn Lovelys
RACKET: singer/guitarist
COMRADES: Pat Walsh (bass, keyboards, vocals), Jason Beard (drums, percussion), Lawrence Ochs (guitar, lap steel, mandolin)
HAUNT: Hoboken
MERSH: Trouble Creek
SPIEL: By day a DJ (New York's WFMU) and music journalist for NPR, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, by night making country that rocks. Or is that rock that countrys?
HYPE: "A lot of twang woven deep in a Big Star jangle...like Wilco's stubborn cousin who won't sacrifice roots for pop." -- Village Voice


Describe the moment in which music changed your life.

Hearing Big Star's Radio City as a teenager…a friend played me the song "Back Of A Car" and it just knocked me out…the guitars jangling, Jody Stephens' rolling drum fills, the ache in Alex Chilton's voice, the lyric tension. I listened to it 50 times in a row that night. That song made me want to be a songwriter.

I wish I wrote this song:

Lucinda Williams' "Pineola" is about a suicide, but it's also about family, friends, religion -- the ties that bind. It's such a powerful song. Lucinda creates this vast emotional universe with a few simple words, a difficult feat that I would love to master someday.

If I could have been at any concert in history, what would it have been?

It would have to be the Monterey Pop Festival. The world was really shifting at that moment, plus I'd give about anything to have seen Otis Redding live. I truly believe that the world would be a better place if he had lived.

Being on stage is like:

Riding the Cyclone at Coney Island. I know the bottom's gonna drop out sometime, so I hold on tight and pray I don't fall off.

I admit it, my music does sound a little like:

Cheri Knight, maybe. Her second solo album, The Northeast Kingdom, is one of my favorite CDs of the '90s.

What have you blatantly stolen and incorporated into your songwriting or performance?

I'll admit to having lifted Jay Farrar's mid-song "dead stop and bash" thing…it's a mighty good move.