talk about timing. i just finish reading an interview with stephen merrit in the onion's avclub, headlined with the quote, "Sincerity has no place in popular music, any more so than does cooking" when I head over here to see a spirited defense of sincerity in popular music. at the risk of making over-stephen-merritizing this site, here is a link to the article, in which there is no further elaboration on this statement.

it's trickier to be sincere than insincere and have it work. a lot of what passes for sincerity, at least in the mainstream media, is a string of cliches sung in earnest (ie. anything released by sting in the last 15 years) but what i would consider true sentiment (elliot smith's last two albums) is pretty rare. for sincerity to work in a song it has to go beyond intent. a line like 'there's still a little bit of your face i haven't kissed' from damien rice's 'cannonball' communicates a deeper sense of lost love than a line like 'how am i supposed to live without you' (the ubiquity of the lyric doesn't warrant a direct attribution--surely almost every ditty belted out on American Idol includes it) though the intent is the same.

these are obvious examples and to a great extent, good songwriting is subjective but you get my point. or do i have a point? fuck it then. just read the article.